C S70 

A GENT LH MAN. 



BY 

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, LL.D. 



im 7 t893 

SECOND EDITION. S3>* - T ^^jggSE 



NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO : 

BEXZXGER BROTHERS, 

Printers to the Holy A postolic See. 
1893. 




Copyright, 1893. by Benziger Brothers. 



^LL J)OYS WHO WANT TO |$AKE 
Ji'IFE (BhEERFUL. 



preface. 



In offering this little book to that public 
for which it is intended — a public made up 
of young men from fifteen to twenty years 
of age — the author fears that he may seem 
presumptuous. He intends to accentuate 
what most of them already know, not to 
teach them any new thing. And if he 
appear to touch too much upon the trifles 
of life, it is because experience shows that 
it is the small things of our daily intercourse 
with our fellow-beings which make the 
difference between success and failure. He 
gratefully acknowledges his Obligation to the 
Reverend editor of the Ave Maria for permis- 
sion to use in the last part of this volume 
several of the " Chats with Good Listeners." 

The University of Notre Dame, 
February 2, 1893. 

5 



Contents. 

< 

PAGE 

I. The Xeed of Good Maxners, . . 9 

H. Rules of Etiquette, 29 

^ III. WHAT MAKES A GeNTLEMAX. ... 47 

IV. WHAT DOES XOT MAKE A GENTLEMAX. . 64 

V. How to Express Oxe's Thoughts, . 84 

IV. Letter-writixg, 106 

VII. What to Read, 126 

. VIII. The Home Book-shelf, .... 144 

IX. Shakspere, 16S 

X. Talk, Work, axd Amüsement, . " . . 1S1 

- XI. The Little Joys of Life, . . . 194 

7 



A GENTLEMAN. 



i. Gbe 1Heeö of ©ooö /llbanners* 

IHAVE been asked to refresh your mem- 
ory and to recall to your mind the neces- 
sity of certain little rules which are often 
forgotten in the recurrent interest of daily 
life, but which, nevertheless, are extremely 
important parts of education. There are 
rules made by society to avoid friction, to 
preserve harmony, and perhaps to accentuate 
the immense gulf that lies between the 
savage and the civilized man. But, trifling 
as they seem, you will be handicapped in 
your career in life if you do not know them. 
Good manners are good manners everywhere 
in civilization ; etiquette is not the same 
everywhere, The best manners come from 
9 



IO 



The Need of Good Manners* 



the heart; the best etiquette comes from the 
head. But the practice of one and the 
knowledge of the other help to form that 
combination which the world names a 
gentleman, and which is described by the 
adjective well-bred. 

For instance, if a man laughs at a mistake 
made by another in the hearing of that 
other, he commits a solecism in good man- 
ners — he is thoughtless and he appears 
heartless ; but if he wears gloves at the 
dinner-table and persists in keeping them on 
his hands while he eats, he merely commits a 
breach of etiquette. Society, which makes 
the rules that govern it, will visit the latter 
offence with more severity than the former. 

Some young people fancy that when they 
leave school they will be free, — free to break 
or keep little rules. But it is a mistake: if 
one expects to climb in this world, one will 
find it a severe task ; one can never be in- 
dependent of social restrictions unless one 
become a tramp or flee to the wilds of 
Africa. But even there they have etiquette, 
for one of Stanley's officers teils us that some 



The Need of Good Manners. 1 1 



Africans must learn to spit gracefully in 
their neighbor's face when they meet. 

I do not advise the stringent keeping of 
the English etiquette of introductions. At 
Oxford, they say, no man ever notices the 
existence of another until he is introduced ; 
and they teil of one Oxford man who saw a 
Student of his own College drowning. " Why 
did you not save him ?" " How could I ? " 
demanded this monster of etiquette ; " I had 
never been introduced to him." 

Boys at school become selfish in the little 
things, and they seem to be more selfish than 
they really are. Every young man is occu- 
pied with his own interest. If a man upsets 
your coffee in his haste to get at his own, 
you probably forgive him until you get a 
chance to upset his. There is no time to 
quarrel about it, — no code among you which 
in the outside world would make such a 
reprisal a reason for exile from good society. 

When you get into this outside world you 
will perhaps be inclined to overrate the 
small observances which you now look on 
with indifference as unnecessary to be prac- 



12 



The Need of Good Manners, 



tised. But either extreme is bad. To be 
boorish, rough, imcouth, is a sin against 
yourself and against society ; to be too ex- 
quisite, too foppish, too " dudish," — if I may 
use a slang word, — is only the lesser of two 
evils. Society may tolerate a " dude but 
it first ignores and then evicts a boor. 

A famous Queen of Spain once said that 
a man with good manners needs no other 
letter of introduction. And it is true that 
good manners often open doors to young 
men which would otherwise be closed, and 
make all the difference between success and 
failure. This recalls to my mind an instance 
which, if it be not true, has been cleverly in- 
vented. It is an extreme case of self-sacri- 
fice, and one which will hardly be imitated. 

It happened that not long ago there lived 
in Washington a young American, who had 
been obliged to leave West Point because of 
a slight defect in his lungs. He was poor. 
He had few friends, and an education, which 
fortunately had included the practice of 
good manners. It happened that he was 
invited out to dinner ; and he was seated 



The Need of Good Manners. 13 



some distance from the Spanish Ambassa- 
dor, — who had the place of honor; for the 
etiquette of the table is very rigid, — but 
within reach of his eye. Just as the salad 
was served the hostess grew suddenly pale, 
for she had observed on the leaf of lettuce 
carried to this young man a yellow Cater- 
pillar. Would he notice it ? Would he 
spoil the appetite of the other guests by 
calling attention to it, or by crushing it? 
The Ambassador had seen the creature, too, 
and he kept his eye on the young man, ask- 
ing himself the same questions. 

The awful moment came : the young 
man's plate of salad was before him ; the 
hostess tried to appear unconcerned, but 
her face flushed. Our young man lifted the 
leaf, caught sight of the Caterpillar, paused 
half a second, and then heroically swallowed 
lettuce, caterpillar and all ! The hostess felts 
as if he had saved her life. 

After dinner, the Ambassador asked to be 
introduced to him. A week later he was 
sent to Cuba as English secretary to a high 
official there. The climate has suited him ; 



r 4 



The Need of Good Manners. 



his health is restored ; and he has begun a 
career under the most favorable auspices. 

You know the story of Sir Walter Raleigh 
and the cloak. Sir Walter was poor, young, 
and without favor at court. One day Queen 
Elizabeth hesitated to step on a muddy 
place in the road ; off came Sir Walter's 
new cloak, — his best and only one, — all satin 
and velvet and gold lace. Down it went as 
a carpet for the Queen's feet, and his fortune 
was made. 

But neither our West-Pointer nor Sir 
Walter would have made his fortune by his 
good manners if he had not disciplined him- 
self to be thoughtful and alert. 

On the other hand, many a man has lost 
much by inattention to the little rules of 
society. One of the best young men I ever 
knew failed to get certain letters of intro- 
duction, which would have helped him mate- 
rially, because he would wear a tall hat and 
a sack coat, or a low hat and a frock coat. 
Society exacts, however, that a man shall do 
neither of these things. Remember that I 
do not praise the social code that exacts so 



The Need of Good Manners. 15 



much attention to trifles, — I only say that 
it exists. 

Prosper Merimee lost bis influence at the 
court of Napoleon the ThircLby a little in- 
attention to the etiquette which exacts in 
all civilized countries that a napkin shall not 
be hung from a man's neck, but shall be 
laid on his knee. Merimee, whö was a 
charming writer, very high in favor with the 
Empress Eugenie, was invited to luncheon 
in her particular circle one day. He was 
much flattered, but he hung his napkin from 
the top button of his coat ; the Empress 
imitated his example. for she was verypolite, 
but she never asked him to court again. It 
is the way of the social world — one must 
follow the rules or step out. 

If a man chooses to carry his knife to his 
mouth instead of merely using it as an im- 
plement for cutting, he is at perfect liberty 
to do so. He may not succeed in chopping 
the upper part of his head off, but he will 
succeed in cutting himself off from the 
kk Dress Circle of Society/' as Emerson 
phrases it. Apart from the first considera- 



i6 



The Need of Good Manners. 



tion that should govern our manners, — 
which is, that Our Lord Jesus Christ means 
that, in loving our neighbors as ourselves, we 
should show them respect and regard, — you 
must remember that politeness is power, and 
that for the ambitious man there is no 
surer road to the highest places in this land, 
and in all others, than through good man- 
ners. You may gain the place you aim for, 
but, believe me, you will keep it with tor- 
ture and difficulty if you begin now by 
despising and disregarding the little rules 
that have by universal consent come to 
govern the conduct of Hfe. One independ- 
ent young person may thrust his knife into 
his mouth with a large section of pie on it, 
if he likes : you can put anything into abarn 
that it will hold, if the door be wide enough. 
They teil me that in Austria some of the 
highest people eat their Sauerkraut with the 
points of their knives. But we do not do it 
here, and we must be governed by the rules 
of our own society. Some of you w r ho 
always want to know the reason for rules, 
may ask why are we permitted to eat cheese 



The Need of Good Manners. 1 7 



with our knives after dinner. I can only 
answer that I do not know and I do not care. 
The subject is not important enough for dis- 
cussion. Good society all over the English- 
speaking world permits the use of the knife 
only in eating cheese. Some people prefer to 
take it with their fingers, like olives, aspara- 
gus, artichokes, and undressed lettuce. So 
generally is this small rule observed, that a 
very important discovery was made not very 
long ago through a knowledge of it. An ad- 
venturer claiming to be a French duke was 
introduced to an American family. He was 
well received, until one day he tried to spear 
an olive with his knife. As this is not a 
habit of good society, he was quietly dropped 
— very fortunately for the family, as he was 
discovered to be a forger and ex-convict. 

You may ask, Why are olives, lettuce, 
and asparagus often eaten with the fingers? 
I can only answer, that it is a custom of 
civilized society. You may ask me again, 
Why must we break our bread instead 
of cutting it? And why must we take a 
fork to eat pie, when we are permitted to 



i8 The Need of Good Manners. 



eat asparagus and iettuce with our fingers? 
I say again that I do not know : all that I 
know is, that these social rules are fixed, and 
that it is better to obey than to lose time in 
asking why. 

But if you should happen to be of a doubt- 
ing turn of mind, accept an invitation to 
dinner from some person for whose social 
standing you have much respect, and then 
if your hostess in the kindness of her heart 
serves pie, take half of it in your right hand, 
close your eyes, bite a crescent of it in your 
best manner, and observe the effect on the 
other guests. You may be quite certain 
that if you desire not to be invited again to 
that house you will have your wish. Society 
in this country is becoming more and more 
civilized and exacting every year ; and you 
will simply put a mark of inferiority on your- 
self in its eyes if you disregard rules which 
are trifles in themselves, but very important 
in their effect. 

A young man's fate in life may be decided 
by a badly-written letter or a well-written 
one, by a rough gesture, by an oath or an 



The Need of Good Manners, 19 



unclean phrase uttered when he thinks no 
one is listening. But let us remember that 
there is ahvays some one looking or hearing ; 
for, and thisisan axiom, there are no secrets 
in life. 

Emerson says, writing of "Behavior:" 
" Nature teils every secret over. Yes, but 
in man she teils it all the time, by form, 
attitude, gesture, mien, face and parts of 
the face, and by the whole action of the 
machine. The visible carriage or action of 
the individual, as resulting from his Organi- 
zation and his will combined, we call man- 
ners. What are they but thought enter- 
ing the hands and feet, Controlling the 
movements of the body, the speech and be- 
havior ?" 

Of the power of manners Emerson further 
says : " Give a boy address and accomplish- 
ments, and you give him the mastery of 
palaces and fortunes wherever he goes. He 
has not the trouble of earning them." 

And in another place : " There are certain 
manners which are learned in good society 
of such force that, if a person have them, he 



2o The Need of Good Manners. 



or she must be considered and is every- 
where welcome, though without beauty or 
wealth or genius." 

Cardinal Newman, in his definition of a 
gentleman, does not forget manners, though 
he lays less stress on their power for worldly 
advancement than Emerson does. Good 
manners are, in the opinion of the great 
cardinal, the outward signs of true Chris- 
tianity. Etiquette is the extreme of good 
manners. A man may be a good Christian 
and expectorate, spit, sprinkle, spray, dif- 
fuse tobacco-juice right and left. But the 
man who will do that, though he have a good 
heart and an unimpeachable character, is not 
a gentleman in the world's meaning of the 
term, for with the world it is not the heart 
that counts, but the manners. You may 
keep your hat on your head if you choose 
when you meet a clergyman or a lady. You 
need not examine your conscience about it, 
and you will find nothing against it in the 
Constitution of the United States ; you may 
be on your way to give your last five dollars 
to the poor or to visit a sick neighbor ; but, 



The Need of Good Manners. 21 



by that Omission you stamp yourself at once 
as being outside the sacred circle in which 
society includes gentlemen. You can quote 
a great many fine sentiments against me, if 
you like ; you may say, with Tennyson, 

" Kind hearts are more than coronets, 
And simple faith than Norman blood." 

God keep us from thinking otherwise ; but, 
if one get into a habit of disregarding the 
small rules of etiquette, if one use one's fork 
for a toothpick, drink out of one's finger-bowl, 
reach over somebody's head for a piece of 
bread, all the kind hearts and simple faith in 
the world will not keep you in the Company 
of well-bred people. You may answer that 
some very good persons blow their soup with 
their breath, stick their own forks into gen- 
eral dishes, and — the thing has been done 
once perhaps in some savage land — wipe their 
noses with their napkins. But if these good 
people paid more attention to the little 
things of life, their goodness would have 
more power over others. As it is, virtue loses 
half its charm when it ignores good manners. 



22 The Need of Good Manners. 



It is only old people and men of great 
genius who can afford to disregard manners. 
Old people are privileged. If they choose 
to eat with their knives or with their nap- 
kins around their necks, — a thing which is 
no longer tolerated, — the man who remarks 
on it, who shows that he notices it, who 
criticises it, is not only a boor, but a fool. 
Young people have no such privileges : they 
must acquire the little habits of good soci- 
ety or they will find every avenue of culti- 
vation closed to them. 

The only time they are privileged to vio- 
late etiquette is when some older person 
does it : then they had better follow a bad 
form than rebuke him by showing superiority 
in manners. 

It is foolish to appear to despise the little 
rules that govern the conduct of life. This 
appearance of contempt for observances 
which have become part of the every-day 
existence of well-regulated people, arises 
either from selfishness or ignorance. The 
selfish man does not care to consider his 
neighbors ; but his selfishness is very short- 



The Need of Good Manners. 23 



sighted, because his neighbors, whose feelings 
and rights he treats as non-existent, will soon 
force the consideration of them on him. 

A young man may think it a fine thing to 
be independent in social matters. He will 
soon find that he cannot afford in life to be 
independent of anything except an evil in- 
fluence. If he prefers the society of loung- 
ers in liquor-saloons orat hotel-bars, he needs 
nothing but a limitless supply of money. 
His friends there require the observance of 
only one rule of etiquette — he must " treat " 
regularly. To young men who hunger for 
that kind of independence and that sort of 
friends I have nothing to say, except that 
it is easy to prophesy their ruin and dis- 
grace. If a man has no better ambition 
than to die in an unhonored grave or to live 
forsaken in an almshouse, let him make up 
his mind to be " independent/' The world in 
which you will live is exacting, and you can 
no more succeed and defy its exactions than 
you can stick your finger into a fire and 
escape burning. 

Even in the question of clothes — which 



24 The Need of Good Manners. 



seems to most of us entirely our own affair — 
society exacts obedience. You cannot wear 
slovenly clothes to church, for instance, and 
expect to escape the indignation of your 
dearest friends. 

In the most rigid of European countries, if 
one happens to be presented to the king one 
wears no gloves : one would as soon think 
of wearing gloves as of wearing a hat. Simi- 
larly, according to the strictest etiquette in 
European countries, people generally take off 
their gloves at the Canon of the Mass, and, 
above all, when they approach the altar, 
because they are in the special presence of 
God, the King of heaven and earth. How 
different is the practice of some of us ! We 
lounge into church as we would into a gym- 
nasium, with no outward recognition of the 
Presence of God except a " dip " towards 
the tabernacle or an occasional and often in- 
appropriate thumping of the stomach, which 
is, I presume, supposed to express devotion. 

It is as easy to bring a flower touched by 
the frost back to its first beauty as to restore 
conduct warped by habit. And so, if you 



The Need of Good Manners. 



2 5 



want to acquire good manners that will be 
your passport to the best the world has, be- 
gin now by guarding yourself from every act 
that may infringe on your neighbor's right, 
from every word that will give him need- 
less pain, and from every gesture at table 
which may interfere with his comfort. We 
cannot begin to discipline ourselves too 
soon ; it is good, as the Scripture says, 
" that a man bear the yoke when he is 
young." 

Social rules, as I said, are very stringent 
on the seemingly unimportant matter of 
clothes : so a man must not wear much 
jewelry, under pain of being considered vul- 
gär. He may wear a pin, or a ring, or a 
watch-chain, if he likes ; but for a young man, 
the less showy these are, the better. It may be 
said that there are a great many people who 
admire diamonds, and who like to see many 
of them worn. This is true ; but if a young 
man puts a small locomotive headlight in 
his bosom, or gets himself up in imitation of 
a pawnbroker's window, he may be suspected 
of having robbed a bank. It is certain that 



26 The Need of Good Manners. 



he will show very bad taste. Lord Lytton, 
the author of " Pelham," who was a great 
social authority, says that a man ought to 
wear no jewelry unless it is exquisitely ar- 
tistic or has some special association forthe 
wearer. 

If a young man is invited to a dinner or to 
a great assembly in any large city, he must 
wear a black coat. A gray or colored coat 
worn after six o'clock in the evening, at any 
assembly where there are ladies, would imply 
either disrespect or ignorance on the part 
of the wearer. In most cities he is expected 
to wear the regulation evening dress, the 
" swallow-tail " coat of our grandfathers, and, 
of course, black trousers and a white tie. 
In London or New York or Chicago a man 
must follow this last custom or stay athome. 
He has his choice. The " swallow-tail " 
coat is worn after six o'clock in the evening, 
never earlier, in all English-speaking coun- 
tries. In France and Spain and Italy and 
Germany it is worn as a dress of ceremony 
at all hours. No man can be presented to 
the Holy Father unless he wears the " swal- 



The Need of Good Manners. 27 



low-tail," so rigid is this rule at Rome, 
though perhaps an exception might be made 
under some circumstances. 

In our country, where the highest places 
are open to those who deserve them, a young 
man is foolish if he does not prepare himself 
to deserve them. And no man can expect 
to be singled out among other men if he 
neglects his manners or laughs at the rules 
which society makes. Speaking from the 
spiritual or intellectual point of view, there is 
no reason why a man should wear a white 
linen collar when in the society of his fellows ; 
from the social point of view there is every 
reason, for he will suffer if he does not. Be- 
sides, he owes a certain respect to his neigh- 
bors. A man should dress according to cir- 
cumstances : the base-ball suit or the Rugby 
flannels are out of place in the dining-room 
or the church or the parior, and the tall hat 
and the dress suit are just as greatly out of 
place in the middle of the game on the play- 
ground. Good sense governs manners ; but 
when in doubt, we should remember that 
there are certain social rules which, if learnt 



28 The Need of Good Manners. 



and followed, will serve us many mortifica- 
tions and even failures in life. 

No man is above politeness and no man 
below it. Louis the Fourteenth, a proud and 
autocratic monarch, always raised his hat to 
the poorest peasant woman ; and a greater 
man than he, George Washington, wrote the 
first American book of etiquette. 



Rtile s of Etiquette. 



29 



11. IRules ot etiquette, 

^^HE social laws that govern the Etiquette 
of Entertainments of all kinds are as 
stringent and as well defined as any law a 
judge interprets for you. It may be thought 
that one may do as he pleases at the theatre, 
in a concert-room, or at a dinner-party ; that 
little breaches of good manners will pass 
unobserved or be forgiven because the per- 
son who commits them is young. This is a 
great mistake. More is expected from the 
young than the old ; and if a young man 
comes out of College and shows that he is 
ignorant of the rules of etiquette which all 
well-bred people observe, he will be looked 
011 as badly brought up. There are certain 
finical rules which are made from time to 
time, which live a brief space and are heard 
of no more. The English, who generally set 
the fashion in these things, call these non- 
essentials " fads." They are made to be for- 
gotten. 



3o 



Rules of Eiiquette. 



For a time it had become a fashionable 
" fad " to use the left hand as much as pos- 
sible, in saluting to take off one's hat with 
the left hand, to eat one's soup with the left 
hand ; but this is all nonsense. Not long 
ago, in New York, every "dude" turned 
up the bottoms of his trousers in all sorts of 
weather, because in London everybody didit. 
Other fads were the earrying of a cane, 
handle down, and the holding of the arms 
with the elbows stuck out on both sides of 
him. Another importation of the Anglo- 
maniacs was the habit of putting American 
money into pounds, Shillings, and pence, for 
people w r ho had been so long abroad could 
not be expected to remember their own cur- 
rency. Another pleasant importation is the 
constant repetition of "don't you know. ,P 
But they are all silly fashions, that may do 
for that class of "chappies" whose most 
serious occupation is that of sucking the 
heads of their canes, or of reducing them- 
selves to idiocy with the baleful cigarette, 
or considering how pretty the girls think 
they are — but not for men. 



Rules of Etiquetie. 



3i 



The rules held by sane people all over 
the English-speaking world are those one 
ought to follow, not the silly follies of the 
hour, which stamp those who adopt them as 
below the ordinary level of human beings. 

Let us imagine that you have been sent to 
Washington on business. I take Washington 
because it is the capital of the United States, 
and, if you do the right thing according to 
social rules there, you will do the right 
thing everywhere eise. So you are going 
to Washington, where you will see one of the 
most magnificent domes in the world and 
the very beautiful bronze gates of the Capi- 
tol, a building about which we do not think 
enough because it happens to be in our own 
country. If it were in Europe, we should 
be flocking over in droves to see it. 

Some kind friend gives you a letter of in- 
troduction to a friend of his. You accept 
it with thanks, of course. It is unsealed, 
because no gentleman ever seals a letter of 
introduction. You read it and are delighted 
to find yourself complimented. Now, if you 
want to do the right thing, you will go to a 



3^ 



Rules of Etiquette. 



good hotel when you get to Washington ; a 
good hotel — a hotel you can mention without 
being ashamed of it. It will pay to spend 
the extra money. And if a woman comes 
into the elevator as you are going up to 
your room, — I would not advise you to take 
a suite of rooms on the ground-floor, — lift 
your hat and do not put it on again until 
she goes out. You will send your letter of 
introduction to your friend's friend and wait 
until he acknowledges it. 

But if you want to do the wrong thing, 
you will take the letter of introduction and 
your travelling bag and go at once to Mr. 
Smith's house. You may arrive at midnight ; 
but never mind that, — people like promising 
young folk to come at any time. If the 
clocks are striking twelve, show how athletic 
you are by pulling the bell out by the wires. 
When the members of the family are aroused, 
thinking the house is afire, they will be so 
grateful to you, and then you can ask for 
some hot supper. This pleasing familiarity 
will delight them. It will show them that 
you feel quite at home. It will ruin you 



Eides of Etiquette* 



33 



eventually in the estimation of stupid people 
who do not want visitors at midnight — 
but you need not mind them, though they 
form the vast majority of mankind. 

If you want to do the right thing, wait 
until Mr. Smith acknowledges your letter of 
introduction and asksyou to call at his house. 
If the letter is addressed to his office, you 
may take it yourself and send it in to him. 
But you ought not to go to his house un- 
til he invites you. After he does this, call 
in the afternoon or evening — never in the 
morning, unless you are specially asked. 
A "morning call" in good society means a 
call in the afternoon. And a first call ought 
not to last more than fifteen minutes. Take 
your hat and cane into the parlor ; you may 
leave overcoat and umbrella and overshoes 
in the hall. A young man who wants to act 
properly will not lay his cane across the 
piano or put his hat on a chair. The hat 
and stick ought to be put on the floor near 
him, if he does not care to hold them in his 
hands. If he leaves his hat in the hall, his 
hostess will think that he is going to spend 



34 



Rules of Etiquette. 



the day in her house. But if she insists on 
taking his hat from him, it will not do to 
struggle for it. Such devotion to etiquette 
might make a bad impressiori. Good feel- 
ing and common-sense must modify all rules ; 
and if one's entertainers have the old-fash- 
ioned impressions that the first duty of hos- 
pitality is to grasp one's hat and cane, let 
them have them by all means; but do not 
take the sign to mean that you are to stay 
all day. A quarter of an hour is long enough 
for a first call. 

" You must have had a delightful visitor 
this morning, ,, one lady said to another. " He 
stayed over an hour. What did he talk 
about ? " The other lady smiled sadly : " He 
told me how he feit when he had the scarlet 
fever, and all about his mother's liver-com- 
plaint." 

Topics of conversation should be carefully 
chosen. Strangers do not want to see a man 
often who tälks about his troubles, his illness, 
and his virtues. The more the " You " is 
used in general society and the less the " I," 
the better it will be for him who has the tact 



Rules of Etiquette. 



35 



to use it. There is no use in pretending 
that our troubles are interesting to anybody 
but our mothers. Other people may listen, 
but, depend upon it, they prefer to avoid a 
man with a grievance. 

If the young man with the letter of intro- 
duction has made a good impression, he will 
probably be invited to dinner. And then, if 
he has been careless of little observances, he 
will begin to be anxious. Perhaps it will be 
a ceremonious dinner, too, where there will 
be a crowd of young girls ready to criticise 
in their minds every motion, and some older 
ladies who will be sure to make up their minds 
as to the manner in which he has been brought 
up at home or at College. And we must 
remember that our conduct when we get out 
into the world reflects credit or discredit on 
our homes or our schools. 

If our young man is invited to luncheon, 
he will find it much the same as a dinner, 
except that it will take place some time be- 
tween twelve and two o'clock ; while a din- 
ner in a city is generally given at six o'clock, 
but sometimes not tili eight. The very 



36 



Rules of Etiquette. 



fashionable hour is nine. In Washington 
the time is from six to eight. If the dinner 
is to be formal — not merely a family dinner 
— our young stranger will get an invitation 
worded in this way : 

Mr. and Mrs. John Robinson 
request the pleasure of 
Mr. James Brown s compaiiy at diimer, 
On Thursday, June the Twentieth, 
At seven de lock. 

Our young man should send an answer at 
once to this, and he must say Yes or No; 
and if Mr. James Brown " regrets that he 
cannot have the pleasure of aeeepting Mr. 
and Mrs. John Robinson's invitation to din- 
ner on June the Twentieth, at seven o'clock," 
let him give a good reason. If he have a 
previous engagement, that is a good reason ; 
if he will be out of town, that is a good rea- 
son ; but he must answer the invitation at 
once, and say whether he will go or not. 
To invite to dinner is the highest social 
compliment one man can pay another, and 
it should be considered in that light. Of 
course if a young man considers himself so 



Rules of Etiquette. 



37 



brilliant that people must invite him to their 
houses, he may do as he pleases, but he will 
soon find himself alone in that opinion. It 
is not good looks or brilliancy of conversation 
that gains a man the right kind of friends : 
it is good manners. Conceit in young people 
is an appalling obstacle to their advancement. 
You remember the story of the New York 
College man who was rescued from drown- 
ing by a ferry-hand. The latter expressed 
his disgust with the reward he received, and 
one of the College man's friends asked him 
why he had not done more for his rescuer. 
" Done more ?" he exclaimed, — he considered 
himself the handsomest man of his class, — 
" Done more ! What could I do? Did not 
I give him my photograph, cabinet size ?" 

If a young man is shy, now will come his 
time of trials. But if he keeps in mind the 
few rules that regulate the etiquette of the 
dinner-table, he will have no reason to fear 
that he will make any important mistakes. 
If his hostess should ask him to take a lady 
in to dinner, he will offer her his left arm, so 
that his right may be free to adjust her chair, 



38 



Rules of Etiquette. 



and he will wait until his place is pointed 
out by the hostess. He will find it awkward 
if he should drop into the first seat he eome 
to — for the laws of the dinner-table are regu- 
larityand beauty. We cannot all be beauti- 
ful, but we can move in obedience to good 
rules. It is important that the man received 
in society should not cover too much space 
with his feet ; he ought to try to keep them 
together. 

A dinner — that is, a formal dinner — gen- 
erally opens with four or five oysters. The 
guest is expected to squeeze lemon on them 
and to eat them with an oyster-fork. If'one 
man is tempted to saw an oyster in half with 
a knife, he had better resist the temptation 
and miss eating the oyster rather than com- 
mit so barbarous an outrage. A guest who 
would cut an oyster publicly in half is prob- 
ably a cannibal who would cut up a small 
baby without remorse. A man must not ask 
for oysters twice. 

After the oysters comes the soup. If the 
dinner party is small, the soup may be passed 
by guest to guest ; but the waiter generally 



Rule s of Et iq nette. 



serves it. It is a flagrant violation of good 
manners to ask for soup twice. It should be 
taken from the side of the spoon if the guest's 
mustache will permit it, and not from the 
tip. Soup is dipped from the eater, not 
toward him. Among the Esquimaux it is the 
fashion to smack the lips after every luscious 
mouthful of liquid grease : with us, people do 
not make any noise or smack their lips over 
anything they eat. no matter how good it is. 
In George Eliot's novel of " Middlemarch." 
Dorothea's sister's greatest objection to Mr. 
Causaban is that Iiis mother had never 
taught him to eat soup without making a 
noise. 

After the soup comes the fish. The young 
guest may not like fish, but he must pretend 
to eat it ; it is bad manners not to pretend to 
eat everything set before one at a dinner. A 
little tact will help anybody to do it. No 
dish must be sent away with the appear- 
ance of having been untasted. It would be 
an insult to one's hostess not to seem to like 
everything s he has offered us. And. as the 
chief duty of social intercourse is to give 



40 



Rules of Etiquette. 



pleasure and to spare pain, this little Sugges- 
tion is most important. 

On this point Mrs. Sherwood, an acknowl- 
edged authority on social mattersi says: 
" First of all things, decline nothing. If you do 
not like certain kinds of food, it is a courtesy 
to your hostess to appear as if you did. You 
can take as little on your plate as you choose, 
and you can appear as if eating it, for there 
is always your bread to taste and your fork 
or spoon to trifle with, and thus conceal 
your unwillingness to partake of a disliked 
course." Fish is eaten with a fork in one 
hand and a piece of bread in the other. There 
was once a man who filled his mouth with 
fish and dropped the bones from his lips to 
his plate. He disappeared — and nobody asks 
where he has gone. If a bone does happen 
to get into the mouth, it can be quietly re- 
moved. The guest who puts his fingers 
ostentatiously into his mouth to take out the 
fish-bones he has greedily placed there might, 
under temptation, actually and savagely tilt 
over his soup plate to scoop up the last drop 
of the liquid. 



Rule s of Et ig nette. 



41 



The next course, after the fish, is the en- 
tree ; it may be almost anything. No well- 
bred man ever asks for a second helping of 
the sweetbreads, or chops, or whatever dish 
may form the entree. It is eaten with the 
fork in the right hand and a piece of bread 
in the left. In England it is considered ill- 
bred to pass the fork from the left hand to 
the right ; but we have not as yet become so 
expert in the use of the left hand, so we use 
our forks with the right. A guest who asks 
for a second portion of the entree may find 
himself in the position of a certain Congress- 
man who had never troubled himself about 
etiquette. He was invited to a State dinner 
at the White House. The courses were de- 
layed by this genial legislator, who would 
be helped twice. When the roasts came on 
he turned to a lady, and in his amiable 
way said, with a fascinating smile, " No, I 
can't eat more ; I'm füll — up to here," he 
added, making a pleasant motion across his 
throat. It was probably the same Congress- 
man who, seeing a slice of lemon floating in 
his finger-bowl, drank its contents, and swore 



42 



Rules of Etiquette. 



that it was the weakest lemonade he had 
ever tasted. 

The roast comes after the entree. Each 
course is eaten slowly, because the host wants 
to keep his guests in pleasant conversation 
at his table as long as possible. If the host 
helps our young guest to a slice of the roast, 
whatever flesh-meat or fowl it may be, the 
guest must not pass it to anybody eise: he 
must keep it himself ; it was intended for him. 
This rule does not apply to the soup and the 
fish and the entrees as it does to the roast. 
Suppose a guest wants his beef rare, or under- 
done, and I pass him the piece given to me by 
the host, because he knows I like it well-done : 
the consequence is that the guest next to me 
gets what he does not like and I get what I 
do not like. Another thing : Begin to eat as 
soon as you are helped. Do not wait for 
anybody ; if you do, your food may become 
cold. 

The seat of honor for the men is always on 
the hostess' right hand ; for the ladies, on the 
right hand of the host. The lady in the seat 
of honor is always helped first. She begins to 



Rules of Et ig nette. 



43 



eat at once. There is nobody to wait for then. 
The rule is that one should begin to eat as 
soon as one is served. This rule maybe fol- 
lowed everywhere, and the practice of it pre- 
vents much embarrassment. 

After the roast there will probably be an 
entremets of some kind. It may be an 
omelette, it may be only a salad, or it may be 
some elaborately made dish. In any case,your 
fork and a bit of bread will help you out. 
When in doubt, a young man should always 
use his fork — never his knife, as it is used 
only to cut with, and to help one's seif to 
cheese. Vegetables are always taken with 
the fork; lettuce too, and asparagus, ex- 
cept when there is no liquid sauce covering 
it entirely. Lettuce, when without sauce, 
asparagus when not entirely covered with 
sauce, are eaten with the fingers. Water-cress 
is always eaten with the fingers, and so are 
artichokes. A dinner ought not to last over 
two hours; but it may. If our guest yawns 
or looks at his watch he is ruined socially. 
He might almost as well thrust his knife into 
his mouth as do either of them. When he 



44 



Rules of Etiquette. 



gets more accustomed to the world, he will 
discern that people object to a view of his 
throat suddenly opened to them. 

But to return to our dinner-party : If 
the finger-bowls are brought on, the general 
custom is to remove them from the little 
plate on which they stand. The little nap- 
kins underneath them are not used : these are 
merely put there to save the plate from being 
scratched by the finger-bowls. As usage 
differs somewhat here, the young guest had 
better watch his hostess and imitate her. 

An ice called a Roman punch is served 
after the roast; it is always eaten with a 
spoon. If a fork is served with the ice-cream 
at the end of thedinner, the amiable young 
man had better not begin to giggle and ask 
"What's this for?" If he never saw ice- 
cream eaten with a fork before, it is not 
necessary to show it. It is very often so eaten, 
and if he finds a fork near his ice-cream plate, 
let him use it just as if it was no novelty. 
To show surprise in society is bad taste; it 
is good taste to praise the flowers, the china, 
the soup. One ought to say that he enjoyed 



Rule 's of Etiquette. 



45 



himself, but never to say that he is thankful 
for a good dinner. It is understood that 
civilized people dine together for the pleasure 
of one another's society, not merely to eat. 

When the little cups of black coffee are 
served, our young guest may take a lump of 
sugar with his fingers, if there are no tongs. 
Similarly in regard to olives, he may take 
them with his fingers and eat them with his 
fingers. One's fingers should be dipped in 
the finger-bowls, — there is a story told of a 
young man who at his first dinner-party put 
his napkin into his finger-bowl and mopped 
his face. The host, who ought to have been 
more polite, asked him if he wanted a bath- 
tub. The boy said no, and asked for a sponge. 

If our young guest be wise he will pay all 
possible attention to the hostess ; the host 
really does not count until the cigars come 
around. Then let the young person beware 
in being too ready to smoke. He. may pos- 
sibly not be offered cigars at all, but if he 
is, and he smokes in any lady's presence 
without asking her permission, the seal of 
vulgarity is impressed on him. 



46 



Rules of Etiquette. 



A guest to whom black coffee is served in 
a little cup ought not to ask for cream. It 
might cause some inconvenience ; it is not 
the custom. When a plate is changed or 
sent up to our host, the knife and fork should 
be laid parallel with each other and obliquely 
across the plate. At small dinners, where 
the host insists on helping you twice, one 
may keep his knife and fork until his plate 
is returned to him. 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



47 



III. lUbat Aaftea a Gentleman, 

ARDINAL NEWMAN made a famous defi- 



nition and description. both in the same 
paragraph. of a gentleman. " It is almost," 
he said, in Iiis " Idea of a University," " a 
definition of a gentleman to say he is one who 
never inflicts pain." And this truth will be 
found to be the basis of all really good 
manners. Good manners come from the 
heart, while etiquette is only an invention of 
wise heads to prevent social friction, or to 
keep fools at a distance. Xobody but an 
idiot will slap a man on the back unless the 
man invites the slap by his own familiarity. 
It seems to me that the primary rule which, 
according to Cardinal Newman, makes a 
gentleman is more disregarded in large 
schools than anywhere eise. There is no 
sign which indicates ignorance or lack of 
culture so plainly as the tendency to censure, 
to jibe, to sneer, — to be always on the alert 
to find faults and defects. On the other 




4 8 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



hand, a true gentleman does not censure, if 
he can help it : he prefers to discover vir- 
tues rather than faults; and, if he sees a 
defect, he is silent about it until he can 
gently suggest a remedy. 

The school-boy is not remarkable for such 
reticence. And this may be one of the rea- 
sons whyhe has the reputation of being self- 
ish, ungrateful, and sometimes cruel. He is 
not any of these things ; he is, as a rule, only 
thoughtless. It has been said that a blunder 
is often worse than a crime ; and thought- 
lessness sometimes produces effects that are 
more enduringly disastrous than crimes. 
Forg^tfulness among boys or young men is 
thoughtlessness. If an engineer forget for a 
moment, his train may go to RUIN. If a 
telegrapher forget to send a message, death 
may be the result ; but neither of them can 
acquire such control over himself that he 
will always remember, if he does not practise 
the art of thinking every day of his life. It 
is thoughtfulness, consideration, that makes 
life not only endurable, but pleasant. As 
Christians, we are bound to do to others as 



JV/iat Makes a Gentleman. 49 



we would have them do to us. But as 
members of a great society, in which each 
person must be a factor even more impor- 
tant than he imagines, we shall find that, even 
if our Christianity did not move us to bear 
and forbear from the highest motives, ordi- 
nary prudence and regard for our own com- 
fort and reputation should lead us to do 
these things. The Christian gentleman is 
the highest type : he may be a hero as well 
as a gentleman. Culture produces another 
type, and Cardinal Newman thus describes 
him. The Cardinal begins by saying that 
" it is almost a definition of a gentleman to 
say he is one who never inflicts pain. This 
description," he continues, " is both refined 
and, as far as it goes, accurate. The gentle- 
man is mainly occupied in merely removing 
the obstacles which hinder the free and un- 
embarrassed action of those about him ; and 
he coneurs with their movements rather 
than takes the initiative himself. The bene- 
fits may be considered as parallel to what 
are called comforts or conveniences in ar- 
rangements of a personal nature : like an 



50 What Makes a Gentleman. 



easy-chair or a good fire, which do their 
part in dispelling cold or fatigue, though 
nature provides both means of rest and 
animal heat without them. The true gen- 
tleman in like manner carefully avoids what- 
ever may cause a jar ora jolt in the minds of 
those with whom he is cast, — all clashing of 
opinion or collision of feeling, all restraint 
or suspicion or gloom or resentment, — his 
great concern being to make every one at 
their ease or at home. He has his eyes on 
all the Company : he is tender towards the 
bashful, gentle toward the distant, and mer- 
ciful towards the absurd ; he can recollect 
to whom he is speaking ; he guards against 
unreasonable allusions or topics which may 
irritate; he is seldom prominent in convern 
sation, and never wearisome. He makes 
light of favors which he does them, and 
seems to be receiving when he is conferring. 
He never speaks of himself except when 
compelled, never defends himself by a mere 
retort ; he has no ears for slander or gossip, 
is scrupulous in imputing motives to those 
who interfere with him, and interprets every- 



What Makes a Gentleman. 51 



thing for the best. He is never mean or 
little in his disputes, never takes unfair ad- 
vantage, never mistakes personalities or 
sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates 
evil which he dare not say out. From a 
long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim 
of the ancient sage, that we should ever con- 
duct ourselves towards our enemy as if he 
were one day to be our friend." 

The Cardinal's definition of a gentleman 
does not end with these words : you can find 
it for yourself in his " Idea of a University," 
page 204. It will be found, on examination, 
to contain the principles which give a man 
power to make his own life and that of his 
fellow-beings cheerful and pleasant. And 
life is short enough and hard enough to 
need all the kindness, all the cheerfulness, 
all the gentleness, that we can put into 
it. 

If a friend passes from among us, one of 
the most enduring of our consolations is that 
we never gave him needless pain while he 
lived. And who can say which of our friends 
may go next ? He who sits by you to-night, 



52 What Makes a Gentleman. 



he who greets you first in the morning, may 
suffer from a hasty word or a thoughtless act 
that you can never recall. 

It is in the ordinary ways of life that the 
true gentleman shows himself. He does not 
wait until he gets out of school to pay atten- 
tion to the little things. He begins here, 
and he begins the moment he feels that he 
ought to begin. Somebody once wrote that 
the man who has never made a mistake is a 
fool. And another man added to this, that 
a wise man makes mistakes, but never the 
same mistake twice. A gentleman at heart 
may blush when he thinks of his mistakes, 
but he never repeats them. It is a mistake 
made by thoughtless young people to stand 
near others who are talking. It is a grave 
sin against politeness for them to listen, as 
they sometimes do, with eyes and ears open 
for fear they should miss any of the words 
not intended for them. The young man 
thus engaged is an object of pity and con- 
tempt. Politeness may prevent others from 
rebukinghim publicly, but it does not change 
their opinion of him, nor does it enter their 



What Makes a Gentleman. 53 



minds to excuse him on the plea that he 
" didn't think." 

It does not seem to strike some of you 
that the convenience of those who work for 
you ought to be considered, and that unnec- 
essary splashings of liquids and dropping of 
crumbs and morsels of food is the most rep- 
rehensible indication of thoughtlessness. 

We often forget that criticism does not 
mean fault-finding. It means rather the art 
of finding virtues ; and after any private enter- 
tainment, at which each performer has done 
his best for Iiis audience, it is very bad taste 
to point out all the defects in his work : you 
may do this at rehearsal, but not after the 
work is done ; you may discourage him by 
touching on something that he cannot help. 
A friend of mine once played a part in Box 
and Cox, but on the day after the perform 
ance he was much cast down by the com- 
ments in one of the daily papers. " Mr- 
Smith/' the critic said, " was admirable, but 
he should not have made himself ridiculous 
by wearing such an abnorm ally long false 
nose." As the nose happened to be Mr, 



54 What Makes a Gentleman. 



Smith's own, he was discouraged. Criticism 
of music especially, unless it be intelligent, 
is likely to make the critic seem ignorant. 
For instance, there was on one occasion on 
a musical programme a bailade by Chopin 
in A flat major. The young woman who 
played it on the piano was afterwards hor- 
rified to find herseif described as having 
sung a lively ballad called " A Fat Major " ! 
The musical critic had better know what he 
is talking about or be silent. No, no, gentle- 
men, let us not be censorious about the 
efforts of those who do their best for us ; and 
good-fellowship — what the French call esprit 
de corps — ought to show itself in our man- 
ners. Anybodycan blame injudiciously, but 
few can praise judiciously. At College boys 
especially must remember that the College is 
part of ourselves, and that any reproach on 
our alma mater is a reproach on ourselves. 
Its reputation is our reputation, and the 
critically censorious student will find that, in 
the end, it is the wiser course to dwell on 
the best side of his College life. The world 
hates a fault-finder : he will soon see himself 



What Makes a Gentleman. 55 



left entirely alone with those acute percep- 
tions that help him to find out all that is bad 
in Iiis fellow-creatures and nothing that is 
good. To be a gentleman, one must be 
tolerant, and, above all, grateful. 

In the world outside there are many kinds 
of entertainment. We disposed of the din- 
ner-party in a preceding page. One's con- 
duct anywhere must be guided by good 
sense and the usages of the occasion. At 
a concert, for instance, the main object of 
each person present is to hear the music. 
Anything that interferes with this is abreach 
of good manners. To chatter during a song 
or while a piece of music is played shows 
selfish disregard for the comfort of others 
and a contemptible indifference to the feel- 
ings of the performer. Music may be a great 
aid to conversation, but conversation is no 
assistance to music ; and people who go to a 
concert do not pay for their tickets to hear 
somebody in the next seat teil his private 
affairs in a loud voice. There are some 
human creatures who seem to imagine that 
they may reveal everything possible to their 



56 What Makes a Gentleman. 



next neighbor in a crowded theatre without 
being heard by anybody eise. There is an 
old anecdote, but a true one, of a very fash- 
ionable lady in Boston who attended an 
organ recital in the Music Hall there. She 
was supposed to be an amateur of classical 
music, but her reputation was shattered by 
an unlucky pause in the tones of the organ. 
The music ceased unexpectedly, and the 
only sound heard was that of her voice, soar- 
ing above the silence and saying to her 
friend, " We FRY ours in LARD." Her repu- 
tation was ruined in musical circles. One 
goes to a concert or an opera to listen, not 
to talk. It is only the vulgär, the ostenta. 
tious, the ignorant, that distinguish them- 
selves in public places by a disregard of the 
rights of others. To enter a concert-room 
late and to interrupt a singer, to enter any 
public hall while a Speaker is making an ad- 
dress, is to excite the disapproval of all well- 
bred people. Sir Charles Thornton, for a 
long time British minister at Washington, 
was noted for his care in this particular : he 
would stand for half an hour outside the 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



57 



door of a concert-room rather than enter 
while a piece of music was in progress. 

Weddings, I presume, may be put down 
under the head of entertainments. The 
etiquette of the assistants is very simple. A 
wedding invitation requires no answer : a 
card sent by mail and addressed to the Send- 
ers of the invitation, who are generally the 
father and mother of the bride, isquite suffi- 
cient. It is unnecessary to say that it is not 
proper during a inarriage ceremony to stand 
on the seats of the pews in order to get a 
good look at the happy pair. A tradition 
exists to the effect that a man during a wed- 
ding ceremony once climbed on a confes- 
sional. It is added, too, — and I am glad of 
it, — that he feil and broke his neck. But 
there is no knowing what some barbarians 
will do : watch them on Sundays, chewing 
toothpicks, standing in ranks outside of the 
churches, and believing that the ladies are 
admiring their best clothes. 

My list of entertainments would be incom- 
plete without the dancing party. St. Fran- 
cis de Sales says of dancing, that a little of 



5« 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



it ought to go a great way. Society ordains 
that every man shall learn to dance ; but if 
he can talk intelligently, society will forgive 
him for not dancing. Dancing, after all, is 
only a Substitute for conversation ; and, 
properly directed, it is a very good Substitute 
for scandal, mean gossip, or the frivolous 
chatter which makes assemblies of young 
people unendurable to anybody who has not 
begun to be afflicted with softening of the 
brain. 

Public dances — dances into which any- 
body can find entrance by paying a fee — are 
avoided by decent people. A young man 
who has any regard for his reputation will 
avoid them ; and as nearly every young man 
has his way to make in the world, he can- 
not too soon realize how the report that he 
frequents such places will hurt him ; for, as 
I said, there are no secrets in this world, — 
everything comes out sooner or later. 

It is no longer the fashion for a young man 
to invite a young woman to accompany him 
to a dance, even at a private house. He 
must first ask her mother. This European 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



59 



fashion has — thank Heaven ! — reached many 
remote districts of late. where young people 
hitherto ignored the existence of their par- 
ents when social pleasures were concerned, 
The young girl who doesn't want the " old 
man to know" had better be avoided. And 
in the best circles young women are not 
permitted to go to the theatre or to dances 
without a chaperon^ — that is, the mother or 
some elderly lady is expected to accompany 
the young people. This, of course. makes 
trips to the theatre expensive : but the young 
man who cannot afford to take an extra 
aunt or mother had better avoid such amuse- 
ments until he can. 

As to whether you are to take part in the 
round dances or not, that will be settled by 
your confessor : I have no right to dictate 
on that subject. But if you are invited to a 
dance, pay your respects to your hostess 
first, and say something pleasant. You must 
remember that she intends that you shall be 
useful, — that you shall dance with the ladies 
to whom she introduces you, and that you 
shall not think of your own pleasure entirely, 



6o What Makes a Gentleman, 



but help to give others pleasure by dancing 
with the ladies who have no partners. In a 
word, you must be as unselfish in this frivo- 
lous atmosphere as on more serious occa- 
sions. When the refreshments are served, 
you must think of yourself last. If you want 
to gorge yourself, you can take a yard or two 
of Bologna sausage to your room after the 
entertainment is over. A young man over 
twenty-one should wear an evening suit and 
no jewelry at a dance. Infants under that 
age are supposed to be safely tucked in bed 
at the time the ordinary dance begins. 

At a dance or at any other entertainment 
no introduction should be made thought- 
lessly. If a gentleman is presented to a 
lady, it should be done only after her per- 
mission has been asked and received. And 
the form should be, " Mrs. Jones, allow me 
to present Mr. Smith." A younger man 
should always be introduced to an older man, 
one of inferior position to one of superior 
position. If you are introducing a friend 
to the mayor of your city, you ought not to 
say, " Let me introduce the Mayor to you." 



What Makes a Gentleman. 



61 



On the contrary, the form should be " Mr. 
Mayor, allow me to present my friend Mr. 
Smith." 

On being introduced to a lady, it is not 
the fashion for a man to extend Iiis hand, — 
for hand-shaking on first introduction is a 
thing of the past. If the lady extends her 
hand, it is proper to take it; but the pump- 
handle style is no longer practised, except 
perhaps in some unknown wilds of Alaska. 
After a man is introduced to a lady and he 
meets her again, he must not bow until she 
has bowed to him. In France the man bows 
first ; in America and England \ve give that 
privilege to the woman. An American 
takes his hat entirely from his head when he 
meets a lady ; a foreigner raises it but slightly, 
but he bows lower than we do. In introduc- 
ing people, we ought always to be careful to 
give them their titles, and to add, if possible, 
the place from which they come. If Mr. 
Jones, of Chicago, is introduced to Mr. Rob- 
inson, of New York, the subject for conver- 
sation is already arranged. We know what 
they will talk about. If the wife of the 



6 2 What Makes a Gentleman. 



President introduced you to him, she would 
call him the President ; but if you addressed 
him, you would call him "Mr. President/' as 
you would address the mayor of a city as 
" Mr. Mayor." Mrs. Grant was the only 
President's wife who did notgive her husband 
his title in introductions : she called him 
simply and modestly, " Mr. Grant." 
An English bard sings : 

" I know a duke ; well— let him pass — 
I may not call his grace an ass, 
Though if I did, I'd do no wrong — 
Save to the asses and my song. 

"The duke is neither wise nor good : 
He gambles, drinks, scorns womanhood; 
And at the age of twenty-four 
Is worn and battered as threescore. 

" I know a waiter in Pall Mall, 
Who works and waits and reasons well ; 
Is gentle, courteous, and refined, 
And has a magnet in his mind. 

" What is it makes his graceless grace 
So like a jockey out of place ? 
What makes the waiter — teil who. can — 
The very flower of gentleman ? 



What Makes a Gentleman. 

" Perhaps their mothers ! — God is great 
It can't be accident or fate. 
The waiter's heart is true, — and then, 
Good manners make our gentlemen." 



64 What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



iv. Hülbat 2)oc6 IRot /Iftafte a Gentleman» 

ITE have touched on the etiquette of dress 



v v and of entertainments ; and now I beg 
leave to repeat some things already said, and 
to add a few others that need to be said. 

A young man cannot afford to be slovenly 
in his dress. Carelessness in dress will prej- 
udice people against him as completely as 
a badly written letter. He will find himself 
mysteriously left out in invitations. If he 
applies for a position in an office or a bank, 
or anywhere eise, where neatness of dress is 
expected, he will get the cold Shoulder. A 
young man who wears grease Spots habitually 
on the front of his coat, whose trousers are 
decorated with dark shadows and the mud 
of last week, whose shoes are red and rusty, 
and who hangs a soiled handkerchief, like a 
flag of truce, more than half out of his 
pocket, will find himself barred from every 
place which his ambition would spur him to 
enter. You may say that dress does not 




What Docs Xot Make a Gentleman. 65 

make the man. You may call to mind Burns* 
lines to the effect that " a man's a man for a' 
that a piece of silver is only a piece of 
silver, worth more or less, until the United 
States mint stamps it a dollar. The stamp 
of your character and the manner of your 
bringing up give you the value at which the 
world appraises you. 

I recall to mind an instance which shows 
that we cannot always control our dress. 
There was a boy at school who was the 
shortest and the youngest among three tall 
brothers. He never had any clothes of Iiis 
own. He had to wear the cast-off suits 01 
the other brothers, and it was 110 unusual 
thing for Iiis trousers to trip him up when 
he tried to run, although they were fastened 
well up under Iiis Shoulders. This unhappy 
youth was the victim of circumstances ; if he 
made a bad Impression, he could not help it. 
But he was alwavs neat and clean, and he 
never put grease 011 Iiis hair or leaned against 
papered walls in order to leave Iiis mark 
there. He never saturated himself with 
cologne to avoid a bath ; he never chewed 



66 



What Does Not Make a Gentlernan. 



gum ; he was never seen with a dirty-yellow 
rivulet at either side of his lips, which flowed 
from a plug of tobacco somewhere in his 
gullet ; and so, though he was pitied for the 
eccentricities of his toilet, he was not de- 
spised. 

In a country where we do not have to buy 
water there is no excuse for neglecting the 
bath. The average Englishman talks so 
much of his bath and his tub, that one cannot 
help thinking that the Order of Bath is a 
late discovery in his country, although we 
knovv it was instituted long ago. Every boy 
ought to keep himself "well groomed;" to 
be clean outside and in gives him a solid 
respect for himself that makesothers respect 
him. It is like a College education : it causes 
him to feel that he is any man's equal. But 
one with a sham diamond in his bosom, or 
cuffs that he has to shove up his sleeves every 
now and then to prevent them from showing 
how dirty they are, can never feel quite like 
a man. 

We Americans have reason to be proud 
of the decay of two arts which Charles 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



67 



Dickens when he wrote " American Notes " 
found in a flourishing condition, — the art of 
swearing in public and the art of tobacco- 
chevving. When Dickens made his first visit 
to this country he was amazed by the skill 
which Americans showed in the art of 
tobacco-chewing. The " spit-box," the spit- 
toon, the cuspidore, — which is supposed to 
be an elegant name for a very inelegant 
Utensil, — seemed to him to be the most im- 
portant of American institutions. We who 
have become accustomed to the cuspidore 
do not realize how its constant presence 
surprises foreigners. They do not under- 
stand why the floor of every hotel should be 
furnished with conveniences for spitting, be- 
cause no country except the United States 
is infested by tobacco-chewers. Charles 
Dickens was severe on the prevalence of the 
tobacco-chewing habit. He was roundly 
abused for his criticisms on our public 
manners. No doubt his censure was well 
founded, for the manners of Americans 
have improved since. To Dickens it seemed 
as if the principal American amusement 



68 



IV hat Does Not Make a Gentleman, 



was tobacco-chewing. He found the Ameri- 
can a gloomy being, who regarded all the 
refinements with dislike, and whose polite- 
ness to women was his one redeeming 
feature. Dickens admitted that a woman 
might travel alone from one end of the 
country to the other and receive the most 
courteous attention from even the roughest 
miner. And this is as true nbw as it was 
then. There are no men in any country so 
polite to women as Americans; and in no 
other country on the face of the earth is the 
sex of our mothers so publicly respected. 
This chivalric characteristic, which Tom 
Moore teils us was the most brilliant jewel 
in the crown of the Irish, " When Malachi 
wore the collarof gold," is now an American 
characteristic, and distinctively an American 
characteristic. So sure are the ladies of every 
attention, that they take the reverential atti- 
tude of men as a matter of course. They 
no longer thank us when we give up our 
places in the street-car to them, or walk in 
the mud to let them pass ; and it is probably 
regard for them that has caused the Ameri- 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 69 



can to cease to flood every public place with 
vile tobacco-juice. 

There was a time when the marble floors 
of our largest hotels were so spotted with 
this vicious fluid that their color could 
not be recognized, when the atmosphere 
reeked with filthy fumes, and many a man 
bit off a large chunk of tobacco between 
every second word. It was his method of 
punctuating his talk. He expectorated when 
he wanted to make a comma and bit off a 
" chew " at a period ; he squirted a half-pint 
of amber liquid across the room for an inter- 
rogation-mark, and Struck his favorite spot 
011 the ceiling to mark an exclamation. But 
we are not so bad as we used tobe. George 
Washington, whose first literary effort was 
an essay on Manners, might complain that 
we lack much, but he would find that the 
tobacco-chewer is not so prominent a figure 
in all landscapes as he formerly was. 

The truth is, that American good sense is 
putting an end to this dirty and disgusting 
habit. There was a time when a man was 
asked for a " chew " on almost every street 



yo What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



corner. But this was in the days of the 
Bowery boys and of the old volunteer fire- 
departments, when stränge things occurred, 
It is related that an English travelier riding 
down Broadway, some time about the year 
1852, found that the light was suddenly shut 
out of his left eye. He fancied for an in- 
stant that his optic nerves had been paralyzed. 
He was relieved by the sound of an apologetic 
voice Coming from the opposite seat. It said : 
"I didn't intend to put that 'chew' into 
your eye, sir. I was aiming at the window 
when you bobbed your head!" And the 
thoughtful expectorator gently removed the 
ball of tobacco from the Englishman's eye ! 

That could hardly occur now. Chewers 
do not take such risks, or they aim straighter. 
For a long time the typical American, as 
represented in English novels or on the Eng- 
lish stage, chewed tobacco and whittled a 
wooden nutmeg. The English have learned 
only of late that every American does not 
do these things. 

If foreigners hate this savage practice, who 
can blame them ? How we should sneer and 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 71 



jeer at the English if, in ferry-boats, in horse- 
cars, in public halls, pools of tobacco-juice 
should be seen, and if perpetual yellow, i 11— 
smelling fountains sprung from mens mouths. 
How Puck would caricature John Bull in Iiis 
constant attitude of chewing ! How filthy 
and barbaric we would say the British were ! 
We should speak of it, in Fourth-of-July ora- 
tions, as a proof of British inferiority. But 
we cannot do this, for the English do not 
chew tobacco, — and some of us do. 

It is a habit that had better be unlearned 
as soon as possible. It is happily ceasing to 
be an American vice, and with it will cease 
the chronic dyspepsia and many of the 
stomach and throat diseases which have be- 
come almost national. Many a man, come 
to the years of discretion, bitterly regrets 
that he ever learned to chew tobacco ; but he 
thought once that it was a manly thing, and 
he learns when too late that the manly thing 
would have been to avoid it. Some of you 
will perhaps remember a fashion boys had — 
I don't know whether they have it now — 
of gettingtattooed by some expert who prac- 



72 What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



tised the art. What pain we suffered while 
a small star was picked in blue ink at the 
junction of the thumb with the hand ! — and 
how proud we were of a blue anchor printed 
indelibly on our wrists! But a day came 
when we should have been glad to have 
blotted out this insignia with thrice the pain. 
And so the day will come when the invete- 
rate tobacco-chewer will wish with all his 
heart that he had never been induced to put 
a piece of tobacco into his mouth. It is one 
of those vices which has an unpleasant sting 
and which is its own punishment. It is un- 
becoming to a gentleman ; it violates every 
rule of good manners, — the spectacle of a 
young man dropping a "quid " into his 
hand before he goes into dinner and trying 
on the sly to wipe off the dirty stains on his 
chin is enough to turn the stomach of a can- 
nibal. 

Going back to the subject of entertain- 
ments, let me impress on you that it is your 
duty when you go into society to think as 
little of yourselves as possible, and to talkas 
little of yourselves. If a man can sing or play 



}Vhat Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



on any musical Instrument orrecite, and he is 
asked to do any of these things, let him not 
refuse. Young women sometimes say no in 
society when they mean yes : but young men 
are not justified in practising such an affecta- 
tion. It is not good taste to show that one is 
anxious to sing or to play or to recite. If you 
are invited out, do not begin at once by talk- 
ing about elocution, until somebody is forced 
to ask you to recite : and do not hum snatches 
of song until there is no escape for your 
friends from the painful duty of asking you 
to sing. The restless efforts of some ama- 
teurs to get a hearing in society ahvays brings 
to mind a certain theatrical episode. There 
was a young actress who thought she could 
sing, and consequently she introduced a vocal 
solo whenever she could. She was cast for 
the principal part in a melodrama füll of 
tragic situations. The manager congratulat- 
ed himself that here, at least, there was no 
chance for the tuneful young lady to try her 
scales. But he was mistaken. The great 
scenewas on. A flash of lightning illumined 
the stage. The actress was holding a pa- 



74 What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



thetic conversation with her mother as the 
thunder rolled. The mother suddenly feil 
with a shriek, Struck dead. And then the 
devoted daughter said, " Aha, mee mother 
is dead ! Alas, I will now sing the song 
she loved so much in life !" And the young 
lady walked to the footlights and warbled 
" Comrades.' , 

She zvould and she did sing, but I am 
afraid the audience laughed. I offer this 
authentic anecdote as a warning to young 
singers that they should neither be hasty nor 
reluctant in displaying their talents. Aman 
goes into society that he may give as well 
as gain pleasure. The highest form of social 
pleasure is conversation ; but conversation 
does not mean a monologue. Good listen- 
ers are as highly appreciated in society as 
good talkers. A good listener often gives 
an impression of great wisdom which is dis- 
pelled the moment he opens his mouth. Mr. 
Gladstone was charmed by a young lady who 
sat next to him at dinner ; he concluded that 
she was one of the most intelligent women 
he had ever met, until she spoiled it all by 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 75 



saying, with effusion, " Oh, I love cab- 
bage !" 

A young man should neither talk too much 
nor too little, and he should never talk about 
himself unless he is forced to. Madame 
Roland, a famous Frenchwoman, who per- 
ished during the Reign of Terror under the 
guillotine, said that by listening attentively 
to others she mademore friends than byany 
remarks of her own. " Judicious silence," 
the author of " In a Club Corner" says, "is 
one of the great social virtues." A man who 
tries to be funny at all times is a social nuis- 
ance. Tvvo famous men suffered very much 
for their tendency to be always humorous. 
These were Sydney Smith and our own 
lamented S. S. Cox. Sydney Smith could 
not speak without exciting laughter. Once, 
when he had said grace, a young lady next 
to him exclaimed, " You are always so amus- 
ing!" And S. S. Cox, one of the most seri- 
ous of men at heart and the cleverest in head, 
never attained the place in politics he ought 
to have gained because he was supposed to 
be always in fun. Jokes are charming things 



76 What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



in a limited circle, but no gentleman nowa- 
days indulges in those practical jokes which 
we have heard of. It is not considered a 
delicate compliment to pull achair away just 
as anybody is about to sit down ; and the 
young person who jabs acquaintances in the 
ribs, to make them laugh at his delightful 
sayings, is not rapturously welcomed in quiet 
families. 

A young man should not make a practice 
of using slang, and he should never use it in 
the presence of ladies. To advise a friend 
to "shut his face" or to " come off the 
perch " may sound " smart," but it is vulgär, 
and is fatal to those ambitious young men 
who feel that their success in life depends 
on the good opinion of cultivated people. 
Moreover, this habitual slang is likely to crop 
out at the most inopportune times. Mr. 
Sankey, of the evangelizing firm of Moody 
and Sankey, at a camp-meeting once asked 
a devout young man if he loved the Lord. 
There was profound silence until the young 
man, who thought in slang, answered in a 
loud voice, " You bet !" 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



77 



Slang is in bad taste ; and the slang we 
borrow from the English is the worst of all 
— the repetition of u don't you know?" for 
instance. " Im going to town, don't you 
know, and if I see your friends, don't you 
know, TU teil them you were asking for 
them, don't you know, — oh, yes, I shall, 
don't you know." Imagine an American 
so idiotic as not only to imitate the vulgar- 
est Cockney slang, but to do it in the vulgär 
est Cockney accent ! There was a woman 
who at a dinner said, " Have some soup, 
don't you know ; it's not half nawsty, don't 
you know." 

I must remind you again not to use, in 
letter-writing, tinted or ornamented paper. 
Let it be white and, by all means, unruled ; 
your envelope may be either oblong or 
square, but the Square form is preferable. If 
you have time and wantto follow the present 
fashion, and also to pay a compliment of 
extreme carefulness to the person to whom 
you are writing, close your letters with red 
sealing-wax. Some old-fashioned people 
look on postal cards as vulgär. However, it 



78 What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



is not well to write family secrets on these 
cheap forms. And if any man owes you 
money, do not ask him for it on a postal 
card : it is against a more forcible law than 
those that make etiquette. Postal cards are 
not to be used except on business. Be sure 
to write the name of the person to whom 
the letter is addressed on the last page of 
the letter. But if you begin a letter with 
" Dear Mr. Smith/' you need not write Mr. 
Smith's name again at the end of the letter. 
Buy good paperand envelopes. And do not 
write on old scraps of paper when you write 
home, Nothing is too good for your father 
and mother ; they may not say much about 
it, but every little attention from you bright- 
ens their lives and helps towards paying that 
debt of gratitude to them which you can 
never fully discharge. 

A young man has asked me to say some- 
thing about the etiquette of cards and calls. 
A man, under the American code of polite- 
ness, need not make many calls. If he is 
invited to an entertainment of any kind, he 
should go to the house of his host to call or 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



79 



leave Iiis card. If it be Iiis first call, he 
must leave a card for each grown-up mem- 
ber of the family. After that he need leave 
only one card. The old fashion of turn- 
ing down the corners of cards is gone 
out. A man's card should be very 
small, not gilt-edged ; it should never be 
printed, but always engraved or written, 
with the address in the left-hand lower 
corner. A man may write his own cards. 
In that case he must not put " Mr." before 
his name. But if he has them engraved, 
the present usage demands that " Mr." must 
appear before Iiis name. If he has been at 
a party of any kind, he must call within a 
week after it, or he can send Iiis card with 
Iiis mother or sister, if they should happen 
to be calling at his host's within that time. 
A man's card, like Iiis note-paper, ought to 
be as simple as possible. Secretary Bayard's 
cards always bore the piain inscription, " Mr. 
Bayard." Sciolists and pretenders of all 
kinds put a great number of titles on their 
cards. Corn-cutters and spiritists and quacks 
of all sorts are always sure to print " Pro- 



So What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 

fessor " before their names, but men who 
have a right to the title never do it. Be 
sure, then, to have a neat, piain card, well 
engraved. It costs very little to have a 
plate made by a good stationery firm ; and a 
neat, elegant card, like a well-written letter, 
is a good introduction. It symbolizes the 
man. Daniel Webster's card was simply 
" Mr. Webster/' and it expressed the man's 
hatred for all pretence. A gentleman should 
never call on a young lady without asking 
for her mother or her chaperon. And he 
should never leave a card for her without 
leaving one for her mother. It will not do 
to send a card by mail after one has been 
asked to dinner. A personal visit must be 
made and a card left. In calling on the sons 
or daughters of a family, cards should be 
left for the father and mother. 

It may surprise some young men to find 
that in the great world fathers and mothers 
are so much considered. I know that there 
are some boys at school who write home on 
any odd, soiled paper they can find, and who 
write only when they want something or feel 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. Si 



like grumbling. Their letters run something 
like this: 

"Dear Father: The weather is bad. I am 
not well this evening, hoping to find you the same 
Grub as usual. Please send nie five dollars. 

u Yours," etc. 

And, of course, fheir fathers and mothers 
go down on their knees at once and thank 
Heaven for such dutiful and clever boys — 
that is, if you boys have brought them up 
properly. But so many of our parents have 
been so badly brought up. They really do 
not see how superior their children are to 
them. They actually fancy that they know 
more of the world than a boy of sixteen or 
seventeen ; and they occasionally insist on 
being obeyed. It would be a pleasant thing 
to form a new society among you — a society 
for the proper bringing up of fathers and 
mothers. At present there are some parents 
who really refuse to be the slaves of their 
children, or to take their advice. This is 
unreasonable, I know, but it is true. Think 
how frightful it is for a young man of spirit 
to be kept at College during the best years 



82 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 



of his life, when he might be learning new 
clog-dance steps on street-corners or reading 
detective stories all day long! 

It would be hard to change things now ; 
and the fact remains that in good society 
fathers and mothers are considered before 
their children. The man who lacks rever- 
ence for his parents, who shows irritation to 
them, who pains them by his grumbling and 
fault-finding, is no gentleman. He is what 
the English call a cad. He is the most con- 
temptible of God's creatures. Let me sum 
up in the famous lines which you all ought 
to know by heart ; they are the words that 
Shakspere puts into the mouth of Polonius 
when his son Laertes is about to depart into 
the great world : 

" Give thy thoughts no tongue, 
Nor any unproportioned thought his ACT. 
Be thou familiär, but by no means vulgär: 
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, 
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel ; 
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment ' 
Of each nevv-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, 
Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee. 



What Does Not Make a Gentleman. 

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice ; 
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. 
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 
But not expressed in fancy ; rieh, not gandy ; 
For the apparel oft proclaims the man. 

Neither a borrower nor a lexder be; 
For loan oft loses both itself and friend, 
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry, 
This, above all : to thine own seif be true ; 
And it must folloiv, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to ANY man 99 



84 How to Express One s Thoughts. 



v. Dow to Sspreöö One's Gbouabts* 

TV/TR. Frederick Harrison, a man of 
■^1 letters, whose literary judgments are 
as right as his philosophical judgments are 
wrong, teils us that the making of many 
books and the reading of periodical sheets 
obscure the perception and benumb the 
mind. " The incessant accumulation of fresh 
books must hinder any real knowledge of 
the old ; for the multiplicity of volumes be- 
comes a bar upon our use of any. In litera- 
ture especially does it hold that we cannot 
see the wood for the trees." I am not about 
to advise you to add to the number of use- 
less leaves which hide the forms of noble 
trees ; but, if your resolve to write outlives 
the work of preparation, you may be able to 
give the world a new classic, or, at least, 
something that will cheer and elevate. This 
preparation is rigid. Two important qual- 
ities of it must be keen Observation and 



How to Express One's Thougkts. 



85 



careful reading. It is a pity that an old dia- 
logue on " Eyes or Xo Eyes" is no longer 
included in the reading-books for children. 
The modern book-makers have improved it 
out of existence ; nevertheless, it taught a 
good lesson. It describes the experience of 
two boys on a country road. Common 
things are about them. — wild flowers, weeds, 
a ditch, — but one discovers many hidden 
things by the power of Observation, while 
the other sees nothing but the outside of the 
common things. To write well one must 
have eyes and see. To be observant it is 
not necessary that one should be critical in 
the sense of fault-finding. Keen Observation 
and charitable toleration ought to go to- 
gether. We may see the peculiarities of 
those around us and be amused by them ; 
but we shall never be able to write anything 
about character worth writing unless we go 
deeper and pierce through the crust which 
hides from us the hidden meanings of life. 
How tired would we become of Dickens if 
he had confined hlmself to pictures of sur- 
face characteristics ! If we weary of him, it 



86 Hoiu to Express One 's Thoughts. 



is because Mr. Samuel Weller is so constantly 
dropping his ze/s, and Sairey Gamp so con- 
stantly talking of Mrs. Harris. If we find 
interest and refreshment in him now, it is 
because he went deeper than the thousand 
and one little habits with which he distin- 
guishes his personages. 

To write, then, we must acquire the art of 
observing in a broad and intelligent spirit. 
Nature will hang the East and West with 
gorgeous tapestry in vain if we do not see it. 
And many times we shall judge rashly and 
harshly if we do not learn to detect the true- 
heartedness that hides behind the face which 
seems cold to the unobservant. We are 
indeed blind when we fail to know that an 
angel has passed until another has told us of 
his passing. 

Apparently there is not much to think of 
the wrinkled hand of the old woman who 
crosses your path in the street. You catch 
a glimpse of it as she carries her bündle in 
that hand on her way from work in the t wi- 
ll ght. Perhaps you pass on and think of it 
no more. Perhaps you note the knotted, 



How to Express One 's Thonghts. 87 



purple veins standing out from the toil-red- 
dened surface, and then your eyes catch at a 
glance the wrinkled face on which are writ- 
ten the traces of trials, self-sacrifice, and 
patience. It is hard to believe that those 
hands were once soft and dhnpled childish 
hands, and that face bright with happy 
smiles. The story of her life is the story of 
many Hves from day to day. Those coarse, 
ungloved, wrinkled hands will seem vulgär 
to you only if you have never learned to 
observe and think. They may suggest a 
noble story or poem to you, if you take their 
meaning rightly. Life, every-day life, is füll 
of the suggestions of great things for those 
who have learned to look and to observe. 

Mr. Harrison, from whom I have quoted 
already, puts his finger on a fault which 
must inevitably destroy all power of good 
literary production. It is a common fault, 
and the antidote for it is the cultivation of 
the art of careful reading. " A habit of read- 
ing idly," Mr. Harrison says, "debilitates 
and corrupts the mind for all wholesome 
reading ; the habit of reading wisely is one 



88 How to Express One*s Thoughts. 



of the most difficult to acquire, needing 
strong resolution and infinite pains ; and 
reading for mere reading's sake, instead of 
for the sake of the good we gain from read- 
ing, is one of the worst and commonest and 
most unwholesome habits we have." 

In order to write well, one must read well 
— one must read a few good books— and 
never idle over newspapers. Newspapers 
have become necessities, and growlarger each 
year. But the larger they are the more 
deleterious they are. The modern news- 
paper lies one day and corrects its lies, add- 
ing, however, a batch of new ones, on the day 
after. There are a few newspapers which 
have literary value, though even they, mirror- 
ing the passing day, have some of its faults. 
As arule, avoid newspapers. They will help 
you to fritter away precious time ; they will 
spoil your style in the same way that a 
slovenly talker, with whom you associate 
constantly, will spoil your talk; for news- 
papers are generally written in a hurry, and 
hurried literary work, unless by a master- 
hand, is never good work. Nevertheless, in 



How to Express One s Thoughts. 



s 9 



our country, the newspapers absorb a great 
quantity of literary matter which would, 
were there no newspapers, never see the 
light. 

Literature considered as a profession in- 
cludes what is known as journalism, — not 
perhaps reportorial work, but the writing of 
leaders, book reviews, theatrical notices, and 
other articles which require a light touch, 
tact, and careful practice, but which do not 
always have those qualities. A writer lately 
said: " Literature has become a trade, and 
finance a profession." This is hardly true ; 
but some authors have come to look on their 
profession as a trade, and to value it princi- 
pally for the money it brings. Anthony 
Trollope, for instance, whose Hovels are still 
populär, set himself to Iiis work as to a task ; 
he wrote so many words for so much money 
daily. This may account for the woodenness 
of his literary productions. In the pursuit 
of art, money should not be the first consid- 
eratron, although it should not be left entirely 
out of consideration ; for the artist should live 
by his art, the musician by his music, and the 



90 II 07V to Express Orte's Thoughts. 



author by his books. Literature, then, should 
be a vocation as well as an avocation. 

Literature, in spite of the many stories 
about the poverty of writers, has, in our Eng- - 
lish-speaking countries, been on the whole a 
fairly well-paid profession. Chaucer was by 
no means a pauper ; Shakspere retired at a 
comparatively early age to houses and lands 
earned by his pen in the pleasant town of 
Stratford. Pope earned nearly fifty thou- 
sand dollars by his translations or, rather, 
paraphrases of Homer. Goldsmith, though 
always poor through his own generosity and 
extravagance, earned what in our days would 
be held to be a handsome competence. Sir 
Walter Scott made enormous sums which he 
spent royally on his magnificent Castle of 
Abbotsford. Charles Dickens earned enough 
to rnake him rieh, and our modern writers, 
though less in genius, are not less in their 
power of securing the hire of which they are 
more than worthy. Mr. Howells has had at 
least ten thousand dollars a year for permit- 
ting his serial stories to be printed in the 
publications of Harper & Brothers. Mr. Will 



How to Express One's Thcughts. 91 



Carleton, the author of " Farm Ballads,'' has 
no doubt an equal amount from his Copy- 
rights. Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, the author 
of "Little Lord Fauntieroy," easily com- 
mands eight thousand dollars for the Copy- 
right of anovel. So you see that thepicture 
often presented to us of the haggard author 
shivering over his tallow candle in a garret 
is somewhat exaggerated. 

But none of these authors attained success 
without long care given to art. They all 
had their early struggles. Mrs. Burnett, for 
instance, was a very brave and hard-working 
young girl ; she was poor ; her only hope in 
life was her education ; she used it to ad- 
vantage and by constant practice in literary 
work. The means of her success was the 
capacity for taking pains. It is the means 
of all success in life. And any man or 
woman who expects to adopt literature as a 
profession must see well, read well, and take 
infinite pains. Probably Mr. Howells and 
Mrs. Burnett had many MSS. rejected by 
the editors. Probably, like many young 
authors, each day brought back an article 



9 2 How to Express Öne's Thoughts. 



which had cost them many weary hours,— 
for literary work is the most nerve-wearying 
and brain-wearying of all work — with the 
legend, " Returned with thanks." Still they 
kept on taking infinite pains. 

Lord Byron awoke one morning and found 
himself famous. But that first morning of 
fame had cost much study, much thought, 
and, no doubt, periods of despondency in 
which he almost resolved not to write at 
all. Poetry does not gush from the poet, 
like fire out of a Roman candle when you 
light it. Of all species of literary composi- 
tion, poetry requires more exquisite care 
than any other. A sonnet which has not 
been written and rewritten twenty times may 
be esteemed as worthless. To-day no modern 
poem has a right to be printed unless it be 
technically perfect. It seems a sacrilege to 
speak of poetry as a profession ; it ought to 
be a vocation only, and the poet ought not 
only to be made by infinite pains taken with 
himself, but born. As to the rewards of ex- 
treme fineness in the expression of poetry, I 
have heard that Longfellow received one 



How to Express One s Thoughts. 93 



thousand dollars for his comparatively short 
poem of "Kemmes," and that Tennyson 
had a guinea a line. But we shall leave out 
poetry in talking of filthy lucre, and consider 
literature as represented by journalism, in 
which there is very little poetry. 

I did not intend to touch on journalism, 
as the work of making newspapers is some- 
times called, but I have been lately asked to 
give my opinion as to whether journalism is a 
good preparation for the pursuit of literature. 
Perhaps the best way to do this would be to 
give the experiences of a young journalist 
first. 

I imagine a young person who had writ- 
ten at least twenty compositions ; some on 
" Gratitude," one on "Ambition," one on 
"The History of a Pin/' and a grand poem 
on the Southern Confederacy in five cantos. 
He had been prepared for the pursuit of lit- 
erature by being made to write a composition 
every Friday. These compositions were 
read aloud in his class. What beautiful sen- 
timents were uttered on those Fridays ! How 
everybody thrilled when young Strephon 



94 How to Express One's Thoughts. 



compared Ireland to "that prairie-grass 
which smells sweeter the more it is trodden 
on"! He had never seen such grass; he 
would not have recognized it if he had seen 
it ; but he had read about it, and when a 
cruel scientific instructor asked him to give 
the botanical name, he turned away in dis- 
gust. His finest feelings were outraged. 
This, however, did not prevent the simile of 
the prairie-grass of unknown genus from can- 
tering through all the compositions of the 
other members of the class for many suc- 
ceeding weeks, until the professor got into a 
habit of asking, when a boy rose to read his 
essay: " Is there prairie-grass in it?" If the 
essayist said yes, he was made to sit down 
and severely reprimanded. Teachers were 
very cruel in those days. 

There was another lovely simile ruthlessly 
cut down in its middle age — pardon me if 
I digress and pour out my wrongs to you ; 
I know you can appreciate them. A boy 
of genius once said that " Charity, like an 
eternal flame, cheers, but not inebriates." 
After that inspired utterance, charity, like. 



Hou> to Express Ones Thoughts. 95 



an eternal Harne, cheered, but not inebriated, 
the composition of every other writer, until 
the same cruel hand put it out. In those 
days we knew a good thing when we saw it, 
and, if it saved trouble, we appreciated it. 

Somewhat later the young person attained 
a position in the office of an illustrated paper. 
It was a newspaper which was so fearful that 
its foreign letters should be incorrect that it 
ahvays had them written at home. The 
young gentleman whose desk was next to 
that of yourobedient servant w r rote the Paris, 
Dublin, and New York letters. The corre- 
spondent from Rome and Constantinople, 
who also did the market reports at home, 
had some trouble with Iiis spelling occasion- 
ally, and made a very old gentleman in the 
corner indignant by asking him whether 
" pecuniary " was spelled with a " c" ora " q," 
and similar questions. This old gentleman 
wrote the fashion column, and signed himself 
"Mabel Evangeline." He sometimes made 
mistakes about the fashions, but they were 
very naturally blamed on the printers. To 
your obedient servant feil the agricultural 



g6 How to Express One*s Thoughts. 



and the religio us columns. All went well, 
for the prairie-grass was kept out of the 
agricultural column, though some stränge 
things went in — all went well until he copied 
out of a paper a receipt for making hens lay. 
He did not know then that it was a comic 
paper, and that the friend who wrote it was 
only in f un. The hens of several subscribers 
lay down and died. There was trouble in 
the office, and the agricultural department 
was taken from him and given to " Mabel 
Evangeline," who later came to grief by de- 
scribing an immense peanut-tree which was 
said to grow in Massachusetts. 

Your obedient servant was asked to write 
leaders on current subjects. How joyfully 
he went to work! Here was a chance to in- 
troduce the prairie-grass and the "eternal 
flame." With a happy face he took his " copy" 
to the managing editor. Why did that great 
man frown as he read: "If we compare 
Dante with Milton, we find that the great 
Florentine sage was like that prairie-grass 
which — " " Do you call this a current sub- 
ject?" he demanded. " It will not do. 



How to Express One's Thoughts. 



97 



Where's the other one?" Your obedient 
servant, in fear and trembling, gave him the 
other slips. He began: "The geocentric 
movement, like that eternal flame which 
cheers, but — " He paused. " When I asked," 
he said, in an awful voice — "when I asked 
you for current subjects, I wanted an edito- 
rial on the fight in the Fourth Ward and a 
paragraph on the sudden rise in lard. Do 
you understand ?" 

Dante and the geocentric movement, the 
prairie-grass and the eternal flame were 
crushed. The wise young person learned 
to adapt himself to the ways of news- 
paper offices, and all went well again, until 
he attempted high art. This newspaper was 
young and not very rieh ; therefore economy 
had to be used in the matter of illustrations. 
The great man, its editor, had a habit of 
buying second-hand pictures — perhaps it was 
not to save money, but because he loved the 
old masters, — and it became the duty of the 
present writer, who was then a young per- 
son, and who is now your obedient servant, 
to write articles to suit the pictures. For 



9 8 



How to Express Ones Thoughts. 



instance, if a scene in Madrid had been 
bought, the present writer wrote about 
Madrid. It was easy, for he had an encyclo- 
paedia in the office ; but if anybody had bor- 
rowed the volume containing " M " we al- 
ways called Madrid by some other name, for 
" Mabel Evangeline," who said he had trav- 
elled, said foreign cities looked pretty much 
alike. " Mabel Evangeline," who sometimes, 
I am afraid, drank too much beer and mixed 
up things, was not to be relied on, for he put 
in a picture of Rome, N. Y., for Rome, Italy, 
and brought the paper into contempt. Still, 
I think this would not have made so much 
difference, if he had not labelled a picture of 
an actress in a very big hat and a very low- 
cut gown, " Home from a convent school." 
He was discharged after this, and the pres- 
ent writer asked to perform his functions. 
Nothing unpleasant would have happened, if 
a picture had not been sent in one day in a 
hurry. It was a dim picture. It seemed to 
represent a tall woman and a ghost. The 
present writer named it " Lady Macbeth and 
the Ghost of Banquo," and spun out a 



Hoiü to Express Oncs Thoughts. 99 



graphic description of the artist's meaning. 
Next day when the paper came out, the pic- 
ture was "The Goddess of Liberty crowning 
Abraham Lincoln." 

It was a mistake ; but who does not make 
mistakes? Who ever saw the Goddess of 
Liberty, anyhow ? If you heard the way 
that editor talked to the promising young 
Journalist, you would have thought he was 
personally acquainted with both Lady Mac- 
beth and the Goddess of Liberty, and that 
they had not succeeded in teachinghim good 
manners. It is sad to think that mere trifles 
will often cause thoughtless people to lose 
their tempers. 

The writing for newspapers is a good in- 
troduction to the profession of literature, if 
the aspirant can study, can read good books 
when not at work, can still take pains in spite 
of haste, and cultivate accuracy of practice. 
The best way to learn to write is to w r rite. 
One engaged in supplying newspapers with 
"copy " must write. If he can keep a strict 
eye on his style — if he can avoid slang, 
" smart M colloquialism, he will find that the 



ioo Hoiu to Express One's Thoughis. 



necessity for conciseness and the little time 
allowed for hunting for the right word for 
the right place will help him in attaining 
ease and aptness of expression. 

The first difficulty the unpractised writer 
has to overcome is a lack of the right words. 
Words are repeated, and other words that 
are wanted to express some nice distinction 
of meaning will not come. Constant refer- 
ence to a good dictionary or a book of Syno- 
nyms is the surest remedy for this; and if 
the writer will refuse to use any word that 
does not express exactly what he means, he 
will make steady advance in the power of ex- 
pression. Words that burn do not come at 
first. They are sought and found. Tenny- 
son, old as he was, polished his early poems, 
hoping to make them perfect before he died. 
Pope's lines, which seem so easy, so smooth, 
which seem to say in three or four words 
what we have been trying to say all our lives 
in ten or eleven, were turned and re-turned, 
carved and re-carved, cut and re-cut with all 
the scrupulousness of a sculptor curving a 
Grecian nose on his statue : 



How to Express One's Thoughts. 101 



" A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 

That is easy reading. It seems as easy as 
making an egg stand on end, or as putting 
an apple into a dumpling — when you know 
how. It is easy because it was so hard ; it is 
easy because Pope took infinite pains to 
make it so. Had he put less labor into it, 
he would have failed to make it live. It is 
true that a thing is worth just as much as we 
put into it. 

Although the desire to write is often kin- 
dled by much reading, the power of writing 
is often paralyzed by the discovery that the 
reading has been of the wrong kind. Again, 
the tyro who has read little and that little un- 
systematically is tempted to lay down his pen 
in despair. Lord Bacon said that " reading 
maketh a füll man, writing a ready man 
from which we may conclude that he who 
reads may best utilize his stock of knowledge 
by learning to write. But he must first read, 
no matter how keen his Observation may be 
or how original his thoughts are ; for a good 
style does not come by nature. It must be 



102 How to Express Öne s Thougkts. 



the expression of temperament as well as 
thought ; but it must have acquired clear- 
ness and elegance, which are due to the con- 
struction of sentences in the good Company 
of great authors. To write, you must read, 
and be careful what you read ; and you must 
read critically. To read a play of Shak- 
spere's only for the story is to degrade 
Shakspere to the level of the railway novel. 
It is better to have read the trial scene in 
" The Merchant of Venice " critically, miss- 
ing no shade in Portia's character or speech, 
no expression of Shylock's, than to have 
read all Shakspere carelessly. To make a 
specialty of literature, one must be, above 
all, thorough. The writings that live have a 
thousand fine points in them unseen of the 
casual reader, and, like the carvings men- 
tioned in Miss Donnelly's fine poem, " Un- 
seen, yet Seen," known only to God. Take 
ten lines of any great writer, examine them 
closely with the aid of all the critical power 
you have, and then you will see that simplic- 
ity in literature is produced by the art which 
conceals art. That style which is easiest to 



How to Express One 's Thoughts. 103 



read is the hardest to write. Genius has been 
defined as the capacity for taking infinite 
pains. 

There is a passage in " Ben Hur" which 
seems to me particularly applicable to our 
subject. You remember, in the chariot-race, 
where Ben Hur's cruel experience in the 
galleys serves him so well. He would not 
have had the strength of hand or the steadi- 
ness of posture, were it not for the work with 
the oars and the constant necessity of Stand- 
ing on a deck which was even more unsteady 
than the swaying chariot. " All experience," 
says the author, " is useful." This is es- 
pecially true for the writer. One can hardly 
write a page without feeling how little one 
knows ; and if the great aim of knowledge 
be to attain that consciousness, the writer 
sooner attains it than other men. 

Everything, from the pink tinge in a sea- 
shell to the varying tints of an approaching 
thunder-cloud, from an old farmer's talk of 
crops and weather to your lesson in geology 
and astronomy, will help you. Do not 
imagine that science and literature are oppo- 



io4 How to Express One's Thoughts. 



nents. For myself, I would not permit any- 
body who did not know at least the rudiments 
of botany and geology to begin the serious 
study of literature. If Coleridge feit the 
need of attending a series of geological lec- 
tures late in life, in order to add to his power 
of making new metaphors and similes, how 
much greater is our necessity for adding to 
our knowledge of the phenomeria of nature, 
that we may use our knowledge to the greater 
glory of God ! Literature is the reflection of 
life, and literature ought to be the crystalliza- 
tion of all know T ledge. 

You will doubtless find that what you most 
need in the beginning is to know more about 
words and about books. But this vacuum 
can be filled by earnest thought and serious 
application, System, and thoroughness. It 
takes you a long time to play a mazurka of 
Chopin's well. It takes you a long time even 
to learn compositions less important. A 
young woman sits many months before a 
piano before she learns to drag " Home, 
Sweet Home !" through the eye of a needle ; 
and then to flatten out again con expressione ; 



How to Express One s Thoughts. 105 



and then to chase it up to the last key until it 
seems to be lost in a still, small protest ; and 
then to bring it to life and send it thunder- 
ing up and down, as if it were chased by 
lightning. How easy it all seems, and how 
delighted we are when our old friend, " Home, 
Sweet Home !" appears again in its original 
form ! But there was a time when it was not 
easy — a time when the counting of one and 
two and three was not easy. So it is with 
the art of writing. It is not easy in the be- 
ginning. It may be easy to make grandilo- 
quent similes about " prairie-grass " and the 
"eternal light which cheers," etc.; but that 
is just like beginning to play snatches of a 
grand march before one knows the scales. 

To begin to write well, one must cut off 
all the useless leaves that obscure the fruit, 
which is the thought, and keep the sun from 
it. Figures should be used sparingly. One 
metaphor that blazes at the climax of an 
article after many pages of simplicity is 
worth half a hundred scattered wherever 
they happen to fall. It is a white diamond 
as compared to a handful of garnets. 



io6 



Letter-ivriting. 



vi. Xetter-wrltütg, 

HPHERE is no art so important in the con- 
A duct of our modern life, after the art of 
conversation, as the art of letter-writing. A 
young man who shows a good education and 
careful training in his letters puts his foot on 
the first round of the ladder of success. If, 
in addition to this, he can acquire early in 
life the power of expressing himself easily 
and gracefully, he can get what he wants in 
eight cases out of ten. Very few people in- 
deed can resist a cleverly written letter. 

In the old times, when there was no Civil 
Service and Congressmen made their ap- 
pointments to West Point at their own sweet 
will, an applicant's fate was often decided by 
his letters. There is a story told of Thad- 
deus Stevens, a famous statesman of thirty 
years ago, that he once rejected an applicant 
for admission to the military school. This 
applicant met him one day in a corridor of 



Letter-writing. 



107 



the Capitol and remonstrated violently. 
4 ' Your favoritism is marked, Air. Stevens," 
he said; "you have blasted my career from 
mere party prejudice." 

The legislator retorted, " I would not give 
an appointment to any blasted fool who 
spells 4 until ' with two 4 ll's ' and 1 tili ' with 
one." And the disappointed aspirant went 
home to look into his dictionary. 

Such trifles as this make the sum of life. 
A man's letter is to most educated people an 
index of the man himself. His card is 
looked on in the same light in polite society. 
But a man's letter is more important than 
his visiting-card, though the character of the 
latter cannot be altogether neglected. 

It is better to be too exquisite in your 
carefulness about your letters than in the 
slightest degree careless. The art of letter- 
writing comes from knowledge and constant 
practice. 

Your letters, now, ought to be caref ul works 
of art. Intelligent — remember I say intelli- 
gent — care is the basis of all perfection ; and 
perfection in small things means success in 



io8 



Letter-writing. 



great. In our world the specialist, the man 
who does at least one thing as well as he 
can, is sure to succeed ; and so overcrowded 
are the avenues to success becoming that a 
man to succeed must be a specialist and 
know how to do at least one thing better than 
his fellow-men. 

If you happen to have a rieh father, you 
may say, " It does not make much differ- 
ence ; I shall have an easy time of it all my 
life. I can spell ' applicant ' with two ' c's 9 
if I like and it will not make any difference." 

This is a very foolish idea. The richer- 
you are, the greater will be your responsi- 
bilities, the more will you be criticised and 
found fault with, and you will find it will 
take all your ability to keep together or to 
spend wisely what your father has acquired. 
The late John Jacob Astor worked harder 
than any of his clerks; in the street he 
looked careworn and preoccupied ; and he 
often lamented that poor men did not know 
how hard it was to be rieh. His hearers 
often feit that they would like to exchange 
hardships with him. But he never, in spite 



Letier-writing. 



109 



of his sorrows, gave them a chance. It is 
true, however, that a rieh man needs careful 
education even more than a poor man. And 
even politicians have to spell decently. You 
have perhaps heard of the man who an- 
nounced in a letter that he was a u g-r-a-t-e-r 
man than Grant." 

Usage decrees certain forms in the writing 
of letters ; and the knowledge and practice 
of these forms are absolutely necessary. 
For instance, one must be very particular to 
give each man his title. Although we Amer- 
icans are supposed to despise titles, the fre- 
quency with which they are borrowed in this 
country shows that we are not free from a 
weakness for them. You have perhaps 
heard the old story of the man who en- 
tered a country tavern in Kentucky and 
called out to a friend, " Major !" Twenty 
majors at once arose. 

You will find that if you desire to keep 
the retard of vour friends vou must be careful 
in letter-writing to give each man his title. 
Every man over twenty-one years of age is 
" Esquire " in this country. Piain " Mr." 



HO 



Letter-writing. 



will do for young people — -except the young- 
est "juniors," who are only " Masters ; " 
everybody eise, from the lawyer, who is 
rightly entitled to " Esquire," to the hod- 
carrier, must have that title affixed to his 
name, or he feels that the man who writes to 
him is guilty of a disrespect. A member of 
Congress, of the Senate of the United States, 
of the State legislatures, has " Honorable " 
prefixed to his Christian name, and he does 
not like you to forget it. But a member of 
the British Parliament is never called "Honor- 
able." When Mr. Parnell and Mr. William 
O'Brien, both members of Parliament, were 
here, this rule was not observed, and they 
found themselves titled, much to their amaze- 
ment, " Honorable." 

Except in business letters, it is better not 
to abbreviate anything. Do not write " Jno." 
for "John," or. " Wm." for "William." 
"Mister" is always shortened into "Mr.," 
and " Mistress" into " Mrs.," which custom 
pronounces " Missus." If one is addressing 
an archbishop, one writes, " The Most Rev- 
erend Archbishop ;" a bishop, " The Right 



Lette r-writing. 



1 1 1 



Reverend ;" and a priest, " The Reverend" — 
always " The Reverend," never " Rev." 

Titles such as " A.M.," " B.A.," " LL.D.," 
are not generally put on the envelopes of 
letters, unless the business of the writer has 
something to do with the scholarly position 
of the person addressed. If, for instante, I 
write to a Doctor of Laws and Letters, asking 
him to dinner, I do not put LL.D. after his 
name; but if I am asking him to teil me 
something about Greek accents, or to solve 
a question of literature, I, of course, write 
his title after his name. 

To put one's knife into one's mouth means 
social exile ; there is only one other infrac- 
tion of social rules considered more damning, 
and this is the writing of an anonymous let- 
ter. It is understood, in good society, that 
a man who would write a letter which he is 
afraid to sign with his own name would lie 
or steal. And I believe he would. If he 
happen to be found out — and there are no 
secrets in this world — he will be cut dead by 
every man and woman for whom he has any 
respect. If he belong to a decent club, the 



112 



Letter-writing. 



club will drop him, and he will be blackballed 
by every club he tries to entcr. By the very 
act of writing such a letter he brands himself 
a coward. And if the letter be a malicious 
one, he confesses himself in every line of it a 
scoundrel. A man capable of such a thing 
shows it in his face, above all in his eyes, for 
nature cannot keep such a secret. 

Another sin against good manners, which 
young people sometimes thoughtlessly com- 
mit, is the writing to people whom they do 
not know. This is merely an impertinence ; 
it is not a crime ; the persons that get such 
letters simply look on the senders as fools, 
not as cowards or scoundrels. 

Usage at the present time decrees that all 
social letters should be written on unruled 
paper, and that, if possible, the envelope 
should be square. An oblong envelope will 
do, but a square one is considered to be the 
better of the two ; the paper should be folded 
to fit under. The envelope and the paper 
should always be as good as you can buy. 
Money is never wasted on excellent paper 
and envelopes. It is one of the marks of 



Lette r-writing. 



113 



a gentleman to have his paper and envelopes 
as spotless and well made as his collar and 
cuffs. 

A man ought never to use colored paper, 
or paper with a monogram or a crest or coat- 
of-arms on it. If you happen to have a coat- 
of-arms or a crest, keep it at home ; any- 
body in this country who wants it can 
get it. White paper and black ink should 
be used by men ; leave the flowers and the 
monograms and the pink, blue, and black 
paper to the ladies. It is just as much out 
of place for one of us to write on pink paper 
as to wear a bracelet. 

Bad spelling is a social crime and a busi- 
ness crime, too. No business house will 
employ in any important position a young 
man who spells badly. He may become a 
porter or a janitor, but he can never rise 
above that if he cannot spell. 

In social letters or notes, one misspelled 
word is like a discord in music. It is as if the 
big drum were to come in at the wrong time 
and spoil a cornet solo, or a careless stroke 
ruin a fine regatta. When dictionaries are so 



H4 



Letter-writing. 



numerous, bad spelling is unpardonable, and 
it is seldom pardoned. 

One of the worst possible breaches of good 
manners is to write a careless letter to any 
one to whom you owe affection and respect. 
Nothing is too good f or your father or mother 
— nothing on this earth. When you begin 
to think otherwise, you may be certain that 
you are growing unworthy of affection and 
respect. 

There is a story told of one of the greatest 
soldiers that this country ever knew, who, 
though he happened to fight against us, de- 
serves our most respectful homage ; this brave 
soldier was the Confederate general Sidney 
Johnston. A soldier had been arrested as a 
traitor on the eve of a battle. The testimony 
was against him ; there was no time to sift 
it, and General Johnston ordered him to be 
shot before the assembled army. A comrade 
who believed in him, but who had no evi- 
dence in his favor, made a last appeal. When 
the soldier was arrested, he had been in the 
act of writing a letter to his father. He 
begged this comrade to secure it and send it 



Letter- ivriting. 



"5 



home. giving him permission to read it. The 
comrade read it and took it to General John- 
ston. It was an honest, loving letter such as 
a good son would write to a kind father. It 
was carefully written. General Johnston read 
it, expecting to find some sign of treason 
there. He read it twice : and then he said 
to the comrade : " Why did you bring this 
to me ?" 

"To show you, general," the soldier an- 
swered, " that a man who could write such a 
letter to his father on the eve of battle could 
not have the heart of a traitor." 

'•You are right," General Johnston said, 
after a pause ; " let the man be released. 

He was released, and later it was discov- 
ered that he had been wrongly suspected. 
He was killed in that battle. Such a son 
would rather have died a hundred times than 
have such a father know that he had been 
shot or hanged as a traitor, 

The letters we write home ought to be as 
carefully written as possible. There is noth- 
ing too good for yonr father or mother. They 
may not always teil you so ; but you may be 



n6 



Letter-writing. 



sure that a well-written and affectionate letz- 
ter from you brightens life very much for 
them. Have you ever seen a father who had 
a boyat school draw from his pocket a son's 
letter and show it to his friends with eyes 
glistening with pleasure ? I have. " There's 
a boy for you !" he says. " There is a manly, 
cheerful letter written to me, sir, and written 
as well as any man in this country can 
write it ! " If you have ever seen a father in 
that proud and happy mood, you know how 
your father feels when you treat him with 
the consideration which is his due. Your 
mothers treasure your letters and give them 
a value they do not, I am afraid, often really 
possess. If you desire to appear well before 
the world, begin by correcting and improv- 
ing yourself at school and out of school. A 
young man who writes a slovenly letter to his 
parents will probably drop into carelessness 
when he writes formal letters to people out- 
side his domestic circle. 

It is a good rule to answer every letter 
during the week of its receipt. It is as rude 
to refuse to answer a question politely put as 



Letter-writing* 



"7 



to leave a letter without an answer — pro- 
vided the writer of the letter is a person you 
know. 

Some young people are capable of address- 
ing the President as " Dear Friend," or of 
doing what, according to a certain authority, 
a young person did in Baltimore. This uri- 
couth young person was presented to Car- 
dinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. 
" Hello, Arch.!" he said — and I fear that his 
friends who were present wished that he 
were dead. 

"Dear Sir" is always a proper form to be- 
gin a letter with to anybody older than our- 
selves, or to anybody we do not know inti- 
mately. And if we begin by " Dear Sir/' we 
should not end with " Yours most affection- 
ately." "Yours respectfully" or "Yours 
sincerely" would be the better form. To 
end a letter with " Yours, etc.," is justly con- 
sidered in the worst possible taste ; and it is 
almost as bad as to begin a letter with 
" Friend Jones," or " Friend Smith," or 
" Friend John" or "Tom." The Quakers 
address one another as " friend ;" we do not. 



n8 



Letter-writing. 



Begin with " Dear John " or " Dear Tom," 
or even u Dear Jones " or " Dear Brown," 
if you like, but do not use the prefix " friend." 
In writing to an entire stranger, one may use 
the third person, or begin with "Sir" or 
" Madam. " Suppose, for instance, you want 
some information from a librarian you do 
not know personally. You may write in this 
way : 

" Mr. Berry would be much obliged to Mr. Bib- 
liophile for Dr. St. George Mivart's book on 'The 
Cat,' which he will return as soon as possible." 

Or Mr. Berry would say : 

" Sir : I should be much obliged if you would lend 
me Dr. St. George Mivart's book on 'The Cat.' 

" Yours respectfully." 

No man in decent society ever puts " Mr." 
before hisown name, except on visiting-cards. 
There, usage has made it proper. A married 
lady or a young girl always has " Mrs." or 
" Miss" on her cards, and, of late, men have 
got into the habit of putting " Mr." on theirs. 
No man of taste ever puts " Mr." before or 



Letter-wriiingi 



119 



" Esq."* after his own name when signing a 
fetter. 

Another fault against taste is a habit — 
prevalent only in America — of writing social 
letters under business headings. Here is an 
example : 

J. J. Robixsox & Co., 
New York. 

Manufacturers and Dealers in the Xewest Styles 
of Coffins, Caskets. and Embalming Fluids. 
Orders carefully attended to. 
AUpayments C. O. D. 
No deductions for damages allowed after thirty days. 

Under that heading appears a note of con- 
gratulation : 

" Dear Tom : I hasten to congratulate you on 
your marriage. Believe me, I wish you every bless- 
ing, and if you should ever need anything in my 
line, you will always receive the greatest possible 
reduction in price. May you live long and prosper ! 
" Yours very affectionately, 

" J. J. Robinson." 

This is an extreme example, I admit ; but 
who has not seen social notes written under 

* The title Esq. really belongs only to those connected 
with the legal profession, but republican usage has much 
extended it. 



120 



Letter-writing. 



business headings just as incongruous? 
When we write to anybody not on business, 
let us use spotless white paper without lines ; 
let the paper and envelopes be as thick as 
possible ; and let us not put any ornamental 
flower, or crest, or coat-of-arms, or any bit 
of nonsense at the top of our letters. The 
address ought to be written plainly at the 
head of our letter-paper, or printed if you 
will. And if we begin a letter with " Dear 
Sir, ,v we ought to write in the left-hand Cor- 
ner of the last sheet the name of the person 
to whom the letter is addressed. But if we 
begin a letter with " Dear Mr. Robinson/' it 
is not necessary to write Mr. Robinson's name 
again. If a man gets an invitation written 
in the third person he must answer it in the 
third person. If 

" Mrs. J. J. Smith requests the pleasure of Mr. 
J. J. Jones's Company at dinner on Wednesday, April 
23, at seven o'clock," 

young Mr. J. J. Jones would stamp himself 
as ignorant of the ways of society if he wrote 
back: 



Letter -writing. 



121 



" Dear Mrs. Smith: Iwill come, of course. If 
I am a little late, keep something on the fire for me. 
I shall be umpire at a base-ball inatch that after- 
noon, and I shall be hungry. Good-by. 

" Yours devotedly, 

" J. J. Jones." 

You may be sure that if young Mr. Jones 
should put in an appearance after that note 
he would find the door closed in his face. 

An invitation to dinner must be accepted 
or declined on the day it is received. One 
is not permitted to say he will come if he 
can. He must say Yes or No at once. The 
words "polite," "genteel," and " present 
compliments ,, are no longer used. " Your 
kind invitation" now takes the place of 
"your polite invitation;" and " genteel " is 
out of date. The letters " R. S. V. P." are 
no longer put on notes or cards. It is 
thought it is not necessary to teil, in French, 
people to " answer, if you please." All well- 
educated people are pleased to answer with- 
out being told to do so. The custom of put- 
ting " R. S. V. P." in a note is as much out 
of fashion as that of drawing off a glove 



122 



Letter -writing. 



when one shakes hands. In the olden times, 
when men wore armor, a hand clothed in a 
steel or iron gauntlet was not pleasant to 
touch. There was then a reason why a man 
should draw off his glove when he extended 
his hand to another, especially if that other 
happened to be a lady. But the reason for 
the custom has gone by ; and it is not neces- 
sary to draw off one's glove now when one 
shakes hands. 

But to return to the subject of letter-writ- 
ing. If you are addressing a Doctor of 
Medicine or Divinity, you may put " Esq." 
after his name in addition to his title " M.D." 
or " D.D. ;" but it is a senseless custom. 
But " Mr." and " Esq." before and after a 
man's name sends the writer, in the estima- 
tion of well-bred people, to "the bottom of 
the sea." Paper with gilt edges is never 
used ; in fact, a man must not have any- 
thing about him that is merely pretty. 
Usage decrees that he may wear a flower in 
his button-hole — and Americans are becom- 
ing as fond of flowers as the ancient Romans ; 
but farther than that he may not go, in the 



Letter-ivrifing, 



way of the merely ornamental, either in his 
stationery or his clothes. 

It is the fashion now to fasten envelopes 
with wax and to use a seal ; but it is not at 
all necessary, though there are many who 
prefer it, as they object to get a letter which 
has been " licked " to make its edges stick. 

Begin, in addressing a stranger, with 
il Madam" or k> Sir." "Miss" by itself is 
never used. After a second letter has been 
received, " Dear Madam" or " Dear Sir" may 
be used. Conclude all formal letters with 
"Yours truly," or " Sincerely yours," not 
" Affectionately yours." Sign your füll name 
when writing to a friend or an equal. Do not 
write " T. F. Robinson" or " T. T. Smith ;" 
write your name out as if you were not 
ashamed of it. 

Put your address at the head of your 
letters, and if you make a blot, tear up the 
paper. A dirty letter sent, even with an 
apology, is as bad a breach of good manners 
as the extending of a dirty hand. Answer 
at once any letter in which information is 
asked. Do not write to people you do not 



124 



Lette r- w riting. 



know or answer advertisements in the papers 
" for fun." A man that knows the world 
never does this. These advertisements often 
hide traps, and a man may get into them 
merely by writing a letter. And the kind of 
" fun" which ends in a man's being pursued 
by vulgär postal cards and letters wherever 
he goes does not pay. 

In writing a letter, do not begin too close 
to the top of the page, or too far down 
towards the middle. Do not abbreviate 
when you can help it ; you may write " Dr.'' 
for " Doctor." 

Do not put a yellow envelope over a sheet 
of white note-paper. It is not necessary to 
leave wide margin at the left-hand side. 
A habit now is to write only on one side 
of the paper ; to begin your letter on the 
first page, then to go to the third, then back 
to the second, ending, if you have a great 
deal to say, on the fourth. A late fad is to 
jump from the first to the fourth. 

With a good dictionary at his elbow, black 
ink, white paper, a clear head, and a remem- 
brance of the rules and prohibitions I have 



Letter-writing, 



given, any young man cannot fa.il, if he write, 
to impress all who receive Iiis letters with 
the fact that he is well-bred. 



126 



What to Read, 



vii. TObat to IReafc, 

OUNG people who determine to study 



English literature seriously sometimes 
find themselves discouraged by the multitude 
of books ; consequently they get into an idle 
way of accepting opinions at second hand — 
the ready-made opinions of the text-book. 
In order to study English literature, it is not 
necessary to read many books; but it is 
necessary to read a few books carefully. The 
evident insincerity of some of the people 
who " go in" for literary culture has given 
the humorous paragrapher, often on the verge 
of paresis from trying to be funny every day, 
many a straw to grasp at. There is no 
doubt that some of his gibes and sneers are 
deserved, and that others, undeserved, serve 
as cheap stock in trade for people who are too 
idle or too stupid to take any interest in 
literary matters. 

Literary insincerity and pretension are suf- 




What to Read, 



127 



ficiently bad. but they are not worse than the 
superficial and silly jeers at poetry and art 
in the line of the worn-out witticisms about 
the "spring poet " and the " mother-in- 
law." 

The young woman who thinks it the prop- 
er thing to go into ecstasies over Robert 
Browning without having read a line of the 
poet's work, except, perhaps, " How They 
Carried the News from Ghent to Aix," is 
foolish enough ; but is the man who sneers 
at Browning and knows even less about him 
any better ? The earnest Student of litera- 
ture makes no pretensions. He reads a few 
books well, and by that obtains the key to 
the understanding of all others. He does 
not pretend to admire epics he has not read. 
He knows, of course, that the Nibelungenlied 
is the great German epic ; but he does not 
talk about it as if he had studied and weighed 
every line. If he finds that the Inferno of 
Dante is more interesting than the Paradiso, 
he says so without fear, and he does not ex- 
press ready-made opinions without having 
probed them. If the perfection of good 



128 



What to Read. 



manners is simplicity, the perfection of liter- 
ary culture is sincerity. 

Among Catholics there sometimes crops 
out a kind of insincerity which almost amounts 
to snobbishness. It is the tendency to praise 
no book until it has had a non-Catholic ap- 
probation. Now that Dr. Gasquet's remark- 
able volume on the suppression of the Eng- 
lish monasteries and Father Bridgett's " Sir 
Thomas More" have received the highest 
praise in England and swept Mr. Froude's 
historical rubbish aside, there are Catholics 
who will not hesitate to respect them, al- 
though they did hesitate before the populär 
laudation was given to these two great 
books. 

When a reader has begun to acquire the 
rudiments of literary taste, he ought to choose 
the books he likes ; but he cannot be trusted 
to choose books for himself until he has — 
perhaps with some labor — gained taste. All 
men are born with taste very unequally de- 
veloped. A man cannot, I repeat, hope to 
gain a correct judgment in literary matters 
unless he works for it. 



What to Read. 



129 



Mr. Frederick Harrison says : " When will 
men understand that the reading of great 
books is a faculty to be acquired, not a nat- 
ural gift, at least to those who are spoiled 
by our current education and habits of life? 
An insatiable appetite for new novels makes 
it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems 
to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet 
country. Until a man can really enjoy a 
draught of clear water bubbling from a moun- 
tain-side, his taste is in an unwholesome State. 
To understand a great national poet, such as 
Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to 
know other types of human civilization in 
ways which a library of histories does not 
sufficiently teach. ,, 

Mr. Harrison is right. It is not always 
easy to like good books ; but it is easier to 
train the young to like them than to cleanse 
the perverted taste of the older. The chief 
business of the teacher of literature ought to 
be the cultivation of taste. At his best, he 
can do no more than that ; at his worst, he 
can fill the head of the Student with mere 
names and dates and undigested opinions. 



What to Read. 



When the student of literature begins really 
to enjoy Shakspere, his taste has begun to be 
formed. He may read the " Vicar of Wake- 
field " after that without a yawn, and learn to 
enjoy the quiet humor of Charles Lamb. He 
finds himself raised into pure air, above the 
malaria of exaggeration and sensationalism. 
His style in writing insensibly improves ; he 
becomes critical of the slang and careless 
English of his every-day speech ; and surely 
these things are worth all the trouble spent 
in gaining them. Besides, he has secured 
a perpetual solace for those long nights— and 
perhaps days — of loneliness which must 
come to nearly every man when he begins to 
grow old. After religion, there is no comfort 
in life, when the links of love begin to 
break, like a love for great literature. But 
this love must be genuine ; pretence will not 
avail; nor will mere " top-dressing" be of 
any use. 

Literature used to be considered in the 
light of a " polite accomplishment." A book 
of " elegant extracts" skimmed through was 
the only means deemed necessary for the 



What to Read* 



acquirement of an education in letters. It 
means a very different thing now, and the 
establishment of the reading circles has 
emphasized its meaning for Catholic Amer- 
icans. It means, first of all, some knowledge 
of philology; it means a critical understand- 
ing of the value of the stones that make up 
the great mosaic of literature, and these 
stones are words. 

A bit of Addison, a chunk of Gibbon, a 
taste of Macaulay, no longer reach the ideal 
of what a Student of Enghsh literature should 
read. We first form our taste, and then read 
for ourselves. We do not even accept Car- 
dinal Newman's estimate of " The Vision of 
Mirza" or "Thalaba" without inquiry ; nor 
do we throw 7 up our hats for Browning merely 
because Browning has become fashionable. 
A healthy sign of a robuster taste is the re- 
turn to Pope, the poet of common-sense, 
and to Walter Scott. But we accept neither 
of these writers on a cut-and-dried judgment 
made by somebody eise. It is better to give 
two months to the reading of Pope and about 
Pope than to fill two months with desultory 



132 



What to Read. 



reading and take an opinion of Pope at 
second band. 

In spite of the ordinary text-book of liter- 
ature, the serious Student discovers that 
Dryden is a poet and prose-writer of the first 
rank, that Newman is the greatest thinker 
and stylist of modern times, that no dramatic 
writer of the last two centuries has come so 
near Shakspere as Aubrey de Vere, and 
that Coventry Patmore's prose is delightful. 
If all the students of literature that read " A 
Gentleman " have not discovered these 
things for themselves, let them take up any 
one of these writers seriously, perseveringly, 
and contradict me if they think I am wrong. 

Matthew Arnold showed long ago that, if 
the basis of English literature was Saxon, its 
curves, its form, its symmetry, its beauty, 
were derived from the qualities of that other 
race which the Saxons drove out. Similarly, 
if the author of that Saxon epic, the "Beo- 
wulf" if Csedmon and the Venerable Bede 
uttered high thoughts, it was reserved for 
Chaucer to wed high thoughts to a form bor- 
rowed from the French and Italians. Chaucer 



What to Read. 



133 



saved the English language from remaining 
a collection of inadequate dialects, The 
Teutonic element supplied his strength ; the 
Celtic element his lightness and elegance. 
Now this Chaucer was a very humble and 
devout Catholic. " Ah ! but he pointed out 
abuses — he was the Lollard, enlightened by 
the morning-star of the Reformation,'' the 
text-books of English literature have been 
saying for many years. " See what he in- 
sinuates about the levity of his pilgrims to 
Canterbury !" All of which has nothing 
to do with his firm faith in the Catholic 
Church. 

Chaucer was inspired by the intensely 
Christian Dante and the exquisite Petrarch, 
but, unfortunately, he took too much from 
another master — the greatest master of 
Italian prose, Boccaccio. When I use the 
word Christian, I mean Catholic — the words 
are interchangeable ; and Dante is the most 
Christian of all poets. 

But Boccaccio was a Christian ; he had 
faith ; he could be serious; he loved Dante; 
his collection of stories, which no man is jus- 



134 



What to Read, 



tified in reading, unless it is for their Italian 
style, has attracted every English poet of 
narrative verse, from Chaucer to Tennyson ; 
and yet, though these stories have moments 
of pathos and elevation, they are füll of the 
fetid breath of paganism. A pope sup- 
pressed them ; but their style saved them — 
for art was a passion in Italy — and they were 
revived, somewhat expurgated. In his old 
age he lamented the effects of his early book. 

The occasional coarseness in Chaucer we 
owe to the manners of the times; for the 
English, far behind the Italians, were just 
awakening from semi-barbarism. Dante had 
crystallized the Italian language long before 
Chaucer was born. Italy had produced the 
precursor of Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, 
and a host of other great men, whose fame 
that of St. Francis and Dante dimmed by 
comparison, long before the magnificent Eng- 
lish language came out of chaos. The few 
lapsesin morality in Chaucer are due both to 
the influence of Boccaccio and to the pagan- 
ism latent in a people who were gradually 
becoming fully converted. But the power of 



IV hat to Read. 135 

ü 

Christianity protected Chaucer : the teaching 
of the Church was part of his very life. and 
nothing could be more pathetic, more honest 
than his plea for pardon. The Church had 
taucht him to love chastity; if he sinned in 
word, he sinned against light. The Church 
gave him the safeguards for his genius ; the 
drosshe gathered from the earthiness around 
him. Of the latter, there is little enough. 

Chaucer was born in 1340; Dante in 1265 ; 
and Dante helped to create the English 
poet. Italy was the home of the greatest 
and noblest men of all the world, and these 
men had revived pagan art in order to bap- 
tize it and make it a child of Christ. Chaucer 
has suffered more than any other poet at the 
hands of the text-book makers, who have 
conspired for over three hundred years 
against the truth. We have been made to 
see him through a false medium. We have 
been told that he was in revolt against the 
religion which he loved as his life. He loved 
the Mother of God with a childlike fervor; 
a modern Presbyterian would have been as 
much of a heretic to him as a Moslem ; he 



136 



What to Read, 



was as loyal a child of the Church as ever 
lived, and to regard him as anything eise is 
to stamp one as of that old and ignorant 
school of Philistines which all cultivated 
Americans have learned to detest. 

The best book for the study of this poet 
is Cowden Clarke's " Riehes of Chaucer" 
(London : Crosby, Lockwood & Co.), the 
knowledge of which I owe to the kindness of 
Mr. Aubrey de Vere. And his works will 
repay study; Mr. Cowden Clarke arranged 
them so that they can be read with ease and, 
after a short time, with pleasure. To see 
Chaucer through anybody's eyes is to see 
him through a darkened glass. Why should 
not we, so much nearer to him than any of the 
commentators who have assumed to explain 
him to us, take possession of him ? He should 
not be an alien to us ; the form of the ink- 
horn he held has changed ; but the rosary 
that feil from his fingers was the same as our 
rosary. 

English literature began with Chaucer. 
He loved God and he loved humanity; he 
could laugh like a child because he had the 



tykat to Read. 



157 



faith of a child. His strength lay in bis 
faith ; and, as faith weakened, English poets 
looked back more and more regretfully at the 
" merrie" meads sprinkled with the daisies 
he loved. He is as cheerful as Sir Thomas 
More; as gay. yet as sympathetic with human 
pleasure and pain. as the Dominican monks 
whom he loved. If he jibed at abuses — if 
he saw that luxury and avarice were begin- 
ning to creep into monasteries and palaces — 
he knew well that the remedy lay in greäter 
union with Rome. Like Francis of Assisi, 
he was a poet. but a poet who loved even 
the defects of humanity, and who preferred 
to laugh at them rather than to reform them. 
Unlike Francis of Assisi, he was not a saint. 
He was intensely interested in the world 
around him ; he was of it and in it : and he 
belongs doubly to us — the Alma Rcdemptoris, 
one of his favorite hymns, which he men- 
tions in "Tale of the Prioress," we hear at 
vespers as he heard it. The faith in which 
he died in 1400 is our faith to-day. 

In no age have been the written master- 
pieces of genius within such easy reach of all 



What to Read. 



readers. But it is true that older people, 
living at a time when books were dearer and 
libraries fewer than they are now, read better 
books ; not more books, but better books. 
Probably in those days people amused them- 
selves less outside their own homes. Some 
teil us that the tone of thought was more 
solid and serious. At any rate, the English 
classics had more influence on the American 
reader fifty years ago than they have to- 
day. The time had its drawbacks, to be 
sure. An old gentleman often told me of a 
visit to a Pennsylvania farm in the thirties, 
when the man of the house gave him, as 
a precious thing, a copy of The Catholic 
Herald two years old ! Now the paper of 
yesterday seems almost a Century old ; then 
the paper of last year was new. 

Unhappily, the book of last year suffers 
the same fate as the paper of yesterday. 
The best way to counteract this unhappy 
condition of affairs is to clasp a good book 
to one with " hoops of steel " when such a 
book is found. 

In considering the subject of literature, 



What to Read, 



139 



there is one great book which is seldom men- 
tioned. This is Denis Florence MacCarthy's 
translations from Calderon. 

Calderon ought not to be a stranger to us. 
He approaches very near to Dante in deep 
religious feeling, and he is not far behind 
him in genius. If no good translation of 
some of his most representative works ex- 
isted, there might be an excuse for the gen- 
eral neglect of this great author by English- 
speaking readers. And MacCarthy has done 
justice to those sublime, sacred dramas, 
called " autos," in which all the resources of 
faith and genius are laid at the feet of God. 
It is to be hoped that in a few years both 
MacCarthy and Mangan may be recognized. 
Those who know the former only by his 
"Waiting for the May" will broaden their 
field of literary knowledge and gain a higher 
respect for him through his translations of 
Calderon. The names of Calderon, the great- 
est of the Spanish poets, and of MacCarthy, 
his chief translator, suggest that of another 
author too little knpwn to the general reader. 
This is Kenelm Henry Digby, whose " Mores 



140 



What to Read. 



Cathoiici" is a magazine of ammunition for 
the Christian readen 

There is an amusing scene in one of 
Thackeray's novels, where a journalist ac- 
knowledges that he finds all the classical 
quotations which garnish his articles in Bur- 
ton's " Anatomy of Melancholy ;" and, in- 
deed, many other things besides bits of 
Latin have been appropriated from Burton 
and Montaigne, in our time, by ready writers. 
Many a sparkling thought put into the crisp 
English of the nineteenth Century may be 
traced back to Boethius. And who shall con_ 
demn this ? Has not Shakspere set us an 
example of how gold, half buried in ore, may 
be polished until it is an inestimable jewel ? 
Kenelm Digby's " Mores Catholici" is a 
great magazine from which a thousand facts 
may be gathered, each fact pregnant with 
Suggestion and Stimulus. Sharp-pointed ar- 
rows against calumny are here : all they 
need is a light shaft and feather and a strong 
hand to send them home. Is an iilustra- 
tion for a sermon wanted ? Is a fact on 
which to found an essay demanded ? One 



What to Read. 



141 



has only to open the " Mores." It is not a 
book which one reads with intense interest : 
one cannot gallop through the three large 
volumes — one must walk, laboriously stowing 
away every treasure. It is, in fact, a book 
through which one saunters, picking so me- 
thing at long intervals, perhaps. You may 
dip into it, as a boy dives for a cent, and come 
up with a pearl-oyster in your hand. It is 
a book to be kept on the lowest shelf, within 
reach at all times ; at any rate, to be one of 
the books to which you go when you are in 
search of a fact or an illustration. 

One of the few sonnets written by Denis 
Florence MacCarthy was addressed to Digby. 
Digby had painted a picture of Calderon and 
sent it to the Irish poet ; hence the sonnet — 

" Thou who hast left, as in a sacred shrine, — 

What shrine more pure than thy unspotted 
page ?— 

The priceless relics of a heritage 
Of loftiest thoughts and lessons most divine." 

And so the names of Calderon and 
MacCarthy and Digbt come naturally to- 
gether ; and tbey are the names of men each 



142 



What to Read. 



great in his way. Theyare not found inthe 
newspapers ; they are seldom seen in the 
great magazines; those societies of the culti- 
vated which are — thank Heaven ! — multiply- 
ing everywhere for the better understanding 
of books know very little about them. Let 
us hope that Miss Imogene Guiney, who 
wrote so well of Mangan in one of the 
numbers of the Atlantic Mönthly, will do a 
similar kind office for MacCarthy. 

As to Calderon, he can be read but in 
parts. Like Milton, he travelled over many 
a barren Stretch of prose thinking it poetry ; 
and so we will be wise to follow MacCarthy's 
lead in choosing from his dramas. He is so 
little knownamong us for the reason that we 
have permitted the English taste — which 
became Protestantized — to separate us from 
him. It is to the German Goethe that we 
owe the revival of the taste for Dante. Be- 
fore Goethe rediscovered him, the English- 
speaking people of theworld held that there 
were only two great poets — Shakspere and 
Milton. 

To reclaim our heritage, we must know 



What to Read. 



143 



something of Calderon. There is no reason 
why our horizon should be limited to that 
which English Protestantism has uncovered 
for us. Calderon represents the literature of 
Catholic Spain at its highest point ; and even 
the most narrow-minded man, having read a 
fair number of the pages of Calderon, can 
deny neither his ardent devotion to the 
Church nor his high genius, nor can he dis- 
prove that they existed together, free and 
untrammelled. We have been told that the 
outbreak of literary genius in the reign of 
Elizabeth was but the outcome of the liberty 
of the Reformation. How did it happen that 
Spain, in which there was 110 Reformation, 
produced Columbus, Calderon, Cervantes, 
and Italy illustrious names by the legion ? 
Knowledge, after all, is the only antidote to 
the miasma of ignorance and arrogance which 
has clouded the judgment of so many writers 
on literature and art. 



144 



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viii. Cbe t>ome JSoofc^sbelt 

TT ought not to be so much our practice to 
A denounce bad books as to point out 
good ones. To say that a book is immoral 
is to increase its sale. But the more good 
books we put into the handsof our boys, the 
greater preservative powers we give them 
against evil. Here is a bit from the Kansas 
City Star which expresses tersely what we 
have all been thinking : 

"The truth is that it is not the boys who read 
' bad books ' who swell the roll of youthful crimi- 
nality; it is the boys who do not read anything. Let 
any one look over the police court of a busy morn- 
ing, and he will see that the style of youth gath- 
ered there have not fallen into evil ways through 
their depraved literary tendencies. They were not 
brought there by books, but more probably by igno- 
rance of books combined with a genuine hatred of 
books of all kinds. There is not a more perfect 
picture of innocence in the world than a boy buried 
in his favorite book, oblivious to all earthly sights 



The Hone Book-shelf, 



145 



and sounds, scarcely breathing as he follows the 
fortunesof the heroes and heroines of the story." 

It depends, of course, on what kind of a 
story it is. A boy may be a picture of inno- 
cence ; but we all know that many a canvas 
on which is a picture of innocence is much 
worm-eaten at the back. If the book be a 
good one. a boy is safe while he is reading 
it — he can be 110 safer. If it is a mere story 
of adventure, without any dangerous senti- 
ment, a boy is not likely to get harm out of 
it. It is the sentimental — not the honest 
sentiment of Sir Walter or Thackeray — that 
does harm to the boy of a certain age, but 
more harm to the girl. A boy 's preoccupa- 
tion with Iiis book may not be ahvays inno- 
cent. It is a father's or mother's duty to 
see that it is innocent, by supplying the boy 
with the right kind of books. This, in our 
atmosphere, is almost as much of a duty as 
the supplying him with bread and butter. A 
father may take thelowest view of his duties ; 
he may be content with having his son taught 
the Little Catechism and with feeding and 
clothing him. However sufficient this may 



146 



The Home Book-shelf. 



be among the peasants of the Tyrol, it does 
not answer in our country. The boy who 
cares to read nothing except the daily paper 
or the theatrical poster has more chances 
against him than the devourer of books. 
The police courts show that. 

The parish library, as a help to religious 
and moral education, comes next to the parish 
school ; it Supplements it ; it ämplifies its In- 
struction : its carries its influence deeper ; it 
cultivates both the logical powers and the im- 
agination. Give a boy a taste for books, and 
he has a consolation which neither sickness 
nor poverty nor age itself can take from him. 
But he must not be left to ramble through 
a library at his own sweet will. There are 
probably no stricter Catholics among our ac- 
quaintance than were the parents of Alexan- 
der Pope, the " poet of common-sense" and 
bad philosophy ; and yet their carelessness, 
or rather faith in books merely as books, led 
him into many an ethical error. 

There is no use in trying to restrict the 
reading of a clever American boy to pro- 
fessedly Catholic books in the English lan- 



The Home Book-shelf. 



147 



guage. "He will ask for stories, and there are 
not enough stories of the right sort to last 
him very long. He will want stories with 
plenty of action in them. — stirring stories, 
stories of adventure, stories of school life, of 
life in his own country ; and we have too few 
of them. And it requires some discrimina- 
tion to square his wants with what he ought 
to want. But that discrimination must be 
used by somebody, or there will be danger. 

Nevertheless, the boy who rushes through 
Oliver Optic's stories, and Henty's and Bold- 
erwood's, is not likely to be injured. They 
are not ideal books, from our point of view. 
He may even read Charles Kingsley's bois- 
terous, stupid st uff ; but if he is a well-in- 
structed boy, he will be in a State of hot 
Indignation all through " Hypatia" and the 
other underdone-roast-beefy things of that 
bigot. Kingsley, with all his prejudice, 
though, is better for a boy than Rider 
Haggard. There is a nasty trail over Hag- 
gard's stories. 

There is some comfort in the fact that the 
average boy is too eagerly intent on his story 



148 



The Home Book-shelf. 



to mind the moralizing. What does he care 
for Lord Lytton's talk about the Good, the 
True, and the Beautiful in " The Last Days 
of Pompeii " ? He wants to know how every- 
thing " turns out." And in Kingsley's 
" Hypatia " — which is so often in Catholic 
libraries — he pays very little attention to the 
historical lies, for the sake of the action. 
Nevertheless, he should be guärded against 
the historical lies. Personally — I hope this 
intrusion of the ego will be forgiven — I had, 
when I was a boy and waded through all 
sorts of books, so strong a conviction that 
Catholics were always right and every one eise 
wrong, that " Hypatia" and Bulwer's " Har- 
old " and the rest were mere incentives to 
zeal ; I thought that if the Lady Abbess 
walled up Constance at the end of " Mar- 
mion," that young person deserved her fate. 

This State of mind, however, ought not to 
be generally cultivated ; a discriminating taste 
for reading should. Do not let us cry out so 
loudly about bad books ; let us seek out the 
good ones ; and remember that it is not the 
reading boy that fills the criminal ranks, but 



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149 



the boy that lives in the streets and does not 
read. 

There should be a few books on the 
family shelf — books which are meant to be 
daily companions — the Bible, the " Imitation 
of Christ,'' something of Father Faber's, 
" Fabiola" and " Dion and the Sibyls," and 
some great novels. 

People of to-day do not realize how much 
the greatest of all the romancers owes to the 
Catholic Dryden. Sir Walter Scott, in spite 
of frequent change in public taste, still holds 
his own. Cardinal Newman, in one of his 
letters, regrets that young people have ceased 
to be interested in so admirable a writer. 
But there is only partial reason for this regret. 
Sir Walter's long introductions and some of 
his elaborate descriptions of natural scenery 
are no longer read with interest. Still, it is 
evident that people do not care to have his 
works changed in any way, Not long ago, 
Miss Braddon, the indefatigable novelist, 
" edited " Sir Walter Scott's novels. She 
cut out all those passages which seemed 
dull to her. But the public refused to 



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read the improved edition. It remained 
unsold. 

It is safe to predict that neither Sir Walter 
Scott nor Miss Austen will ever go entirely 
out of fashion. Sir Walter's muse is to Miss 
Austen's as the Queen of Sheba to a very 
prim modern gentlewoman : one is attired in 
splendid apparel, wreathed with jewels, 
sparkling ; the other is neutral-tinted, timid, 
shy. But of all novelists, Sir Walter Scott 
admired Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. 
He said, with almost a sigh of regret, that 
he could do the big " bow-wow" business, 
but that they pictured real life. 

Nevertheless, while Miss Austen is not 
forgotten — in fact, interest has increased in 
her delightful books of late years — Sir 
Walter Scott's novels are found everywhere. 
Not to have read the most notable of the 
Waverley Novels is. to give one's acquaint- 
ances just reason for lamenting one's illiberal 
education. 

The name of Sir Walter Scott naturally 
suggests that of Dryden, from whom the 
" Wizard" borrowed some of the best things 



The Home Book-shelf, 



in " Ivanhoe" — and " Ivanhoe" is without 
doubt the most populär of Sir Walter Scott's 
novels. That picturesque humbug Macaulay, 
who could sacrifice anything for a brilliant 
antithesis, has done much harm to the reputa- 
tion of Dryden. He gives us the Impression 
that Dryden was a mere timeserver, if a 
brilliant satirist and a third-rate poet. Some 
years will pass before the superficial criticism 
of Macaulay shall be taken at its füll value. 
Dryden was honest — honest in his changes 
of opinion, and entirely consistent in his 
change of faith. No church but that of his 
ancestors could have satisfied the mind of a 
man to whom the mutilated doctrine and 
bald Services of the Anglican sect were natu- 
rally obnoxious. Of the charge that Dryden 
changed his religious opinions for gain, Mr. 
John Amphlett Evans, a sympathetic critic, 
says that, if Dryden gained the approval of 
King James IL, he lost that of the English 
people. Dryden understood this, for he 
wrote : 

" If joys hereafter must be purchased here 
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear, 



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Then welcome infamy and public shame, 
And last, a long farewell to worldly fame." 

If Scott, through ignorance or carelessness, 
misrepresented certain Catholic practices, he 
never consciously misrepresented Catholic 
ideas ; and, as a recent writer in the Dublin 
Review remarks, he showed that all that was 
best and heroic in the Middle Ages was the 
result of Catholic teaching. This was Iiis 
attraction for Cardinal Newman. This made 
him so fascinating to another convert, James 
A. McMaster, who had an inberited Calvin- 
istic horror of most other novels. Scott, 
robust and broad-minded as he was, could 
understand the mighty genius and the great 
heart of Dryden. He was the ablest defender 
of the poet who abjured the licentiousness 
of the Restoration- — mirrored in his earlier 
dramas — to adopt a purer mode of thought. 
Although Dryden was really Scott s master 
in art, Sir Walter did not fully understand 
how very great was Dryden's poem, " Al- 
manzor and Almahide." If Tasso's " Jeru- 
salem Delivered," or Ariosto's " Orlando 
Furioso," ar Milton\s " Paradise Regained," 



The Hone TSook-shelf. 



i53 



or Fenelon's " Telemachus" is an epic, this 
splendid poem of Dryden's is an epic, and 
greater than them all. It is from this poem, 
founded on episodes of the siege of Granada, 
that Sir Walter Scott borrows so liberally in 
" Ivanhoe." 

One cannot altogether pardon the great- 
est fault of all Sir Walter made, the punish- 
ment of Constance in " Marmion." But Iiis 
theory of artistic effect was something like 
Macaulay's idea of rhetorical effect. If 
picturesqueness or dramatic effect interfered 
with historical truth, the latter suffered the 
necessary carving to make it fit. It must be 
remembered, too, that Sir Walter Scott was 
not in a position to profit by modern dis- 
coveries which have forced all honorable 
men to revise many pages of the falsified 
histories of their youth and to do justice to 
the spirit of the Church. 

Sir Walter Scott is always chivalrous and 
pure-minded. How he would have detested 
Froude's brutal characterization of Mary 
Stuart, or Swinburne's vile travesty of her ! 
If his friars are more jolly than respectable, 



154 



The Home Book-shelf. 



it is because he drew his pictures from popu- 
lär ballads and old stories never intended in 
Catholic times to be taken as serious or 
typical. His Templars are horrible villains, 
but he never seems to regard them as villa- 
nous because they are ecclesiastics ; he does 
not intend to drag their priesthood into dis- 
grace ; they are lawless and romantic figures, 
loaded with horrible accusations by Philippe 
le Bei, and condemned by the Pope — ready- 
made romantic scoundrels fit for purposes of 
fiction. He does not look beyond this. 

Scott shows much of the nobility of Dry- 
den's later work. He does not confuse good 
with evil ; he is always tender of good senti- 
ments ; he hates vice and all meanness ; in 
depicting so many fine characters who could 
only have bloomed in a Catholic atmosphere, 
he shows a sympathy for the " old Church" 
at once pathetic and admirable to a Catholic. 
There is no novel of his in which the influ- 
ence of the Church is not alluded to in some 
way or other. And how delightful are his 
heroines when they are Catholic ! How 
charmingly he has drawn Mary Stuart! 



The Home Book-shelf. 155 



And the man that does not love Di Vernon 
and Catherine Seton has no heart for Bea- 
trice or Portia. And then there is the grand 
figure of Edward Glendenning in " The 
Abbot." 

Dryden and Scott both owed so much to 
the Church, were so naturally her children, 
that one feels no ordinary satisfaction in the 
conversion of the one, and some consolation 
in the fact that the last words of the other 
were those of the " Dies Irae." 

Brownson and Newman are two authors 
more talked about than read in this country. 
In England Newmans most careful literary 
work is known ; Brownson's work has only 
begun to receive attention. Newman has 
gained much by being talked and written 
about by men who love the form of things as 
much as the matter, and who, if Newman 
had taught Buddhism or Schopenhauerism, 
would admire him just as much. As there 
is a large class of these men, and as they help 
to form public opinion, it has come to pass 
that he who would deny Newman's mastery 
of style would be smiled at in any assembly 



156 The Home Book-shelf. 



of men of letters. Brownson has not had 
such an advantage. He gave his attention 
thoroughly to the matter in hand ; style was 
with him a secondary consideration. Besides, 
he wrote from the American point of view, 
and sometimes— at least it would seem so — 
under pressure from the printer. Newman 
was never hurried ; Horace was not more 
leisurely, Cicero more exact. It would be 
absurd to compare Newman and Brownson. 
I simply put their names together to show 
that they should be read, even if other 
writers must be neglected, by Catholic Amer- 
icans. I take the liberty of recommending 
three books as valuable additions to the 
home shelf : — Brownson's " Views," and the 
" Characteristics" of Wiseman and Newman. 

Every young American who wants to un- 
derstand the political position of his country 
among the nations should read three books 
— Brownson's " American Republic," De 
Tocqueville's " Democracy in America," and 
Bryce's " American Commonwealth." But 
of these three writers the greatest — incom- 
parably the greatest — is Brownson : he de- 



The Home Book-shelf. 



fines principles ; he clarifies them until they 
are luminous ; he shows the application uf 
them to a new condition of things. There 
have been Catholics — why disguise the fact, 
since they are nearly all dead or imbecile ? — 
who fancied that our form of government was 
merely tolerated by the Church. Brownson 
gave a death-blow to those ancient dragons 
of unbelief. Certain parts of this great 
wörk ought to be a text book in every school 
in the country. And it will now be easier 
to build a monument to this profound think- 
er, as there is a well-considered attempt to 
popularize such portions of his books as must 
catch the general attention, for there are 
many pages in Brownson's works which are 
hidden only because they suffered in their 
original method of publication. 

Open a volume of his works at random, 
and you will find something to suggest or 
stimulate thought, to define a term or to 
fortify a principle. Read, for instance, those 
pages of his on the Catholic American litera- 
ture of his time and you will have a Stand- 
ard of judgment for all time. And who to- 



158 l'he Home Book-shelf. 



day can say what he says as well as he said 
it ? As to those parts of his philosophy 
about which the doctors disagree, let usleave 
that to the doctors. It does not concernthe 
general public, and indeed it might be left 
out of consideration with advantage. 

Brownson's works are mines of thought. 
In them lie the germs of mighty sermons, of 
great books to come. Already he is a classic 
in American literature, and there is every 
reason why he should be a classic, since he 
was first in an untilled ground ; and yet it is 
a sad thing to find that of all the magnificent 
material Brownson has left, the " Spirit 
Rapper,' ' that comparatively least worthy 
product of his pen, seems to be the best 
known to the general reader. 

If one of us would confine himself to the 
reading of four authors in English — Shak- 
spere, Newman, Webster, and Brownson — 
he could not fail to be well educated. The 
" Idea of a University" of Newman is a 
pregnant book. It goes to the root of the 
subtlest matters ; its clearness enters our 
minds and makes the shadows flee. It can- 



The Home Book-shelf. 



159 



not be made our own at one reading. There 
are passages which should be read over and 
over again — notably that on literature and 
the defmition of a classic. Ifanyman could 
make us grasp the intangible, Newman 
could. How sentimental and thin Emerson 
appears after him ! Professor Cook, of Yale. 
has done the world a good turn by giving 
us the chapter on u Poetry and the Poetics 
of Aristotle" in a little pamphlet ; and John 
Lilly's " Characteristics " is a very valuable 
book. Any reader or active man who dips 
into the chapter on the " Poetics " will long 
for more ; and, if he does, the " Character- 
istics" will not slake his thirst ; he will de- 
sire the volumes themselves and drink in new 
refreshments with every page. 

I have known a young admirer of " Lead, 
Kindly Light" — which, by the way, has only 
three stanzas of its own — to be repelled by 
the learned title of " Apologia Pro Vita Sua," 
but. in search of the circumstances tliat helped 
to produce it, to turn to certain pages in this 
presumably uninteresting work. The charm 
began to work ; Xewman was 110 longer a 



i6o 



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pedant to be avoided, but a friend to be ever 
near. 

" Callista " amounts to very little as a 
novel; it is valuable because Newman studied 
its color from authentic sources. But " The 
Dream of Gerontius" is only beginning in 
our country to receive the attention due to 
it. It was a text-book in classes at Oxford 
long before people here touched it at all, 
except in rare instances. It is a unique 
poem. There is nothing like it in all litera- 
ture. It is the record of the experience of 
a soul during the instant it is liberated from 
the body. It touches the sublime ; it is 
colorless — if a pure white light can be said 
to be colorless. It is the work of a great 
logician impelled to utter his thoughts 
through the most fitting medium, and this 
medium he finds to be verse. In Dante the 
symbols of earthly things represent to us the 
mystic life of the other world. Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, chief of the Pre-Raphaelites, imi- 
tated the outer shell of the great Dante — 
the sensuous shell — but he got no further. 
Newman soars above, beyond earth ; we are 



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161 



made to realize with awful force that the 
soul at death is at once divorced from the 
body. Dante does not make us feel this. 
The people that Virgil and he meet are not 
spirits, but men and women with bodies and 
souls in torment. No painter on earth could 
put "The Dream of Gerontius" into line 
and color. Flaxman, so exquisite in his in- 
terpretation of Dante, would seem vulgär, 
and Dore brutal. None of us should lack a 
knowledge of this truly wonderful poem, 
which must be studied, not read. Philoso- 
phy and theology have found no flaws in it ; 
humanity may shiver in the whiteness of its 
light, and yet be consoled by the fact that 
the comfort it offers is not merely imagina- 
tive, or sentimental, or beautiful, but real. 

It is impossible to suppress the love of the 
beautiful in human nature. The early New 
Englanders, to whom beauty was an offence 
and art and literature condemned things — 
who worshipped a God of their own inven- 
tion, clothed in sulphurous clouds and hold- 
ing victims over eternal fire, ready, with the 
ghastly pleasure described by their divines, 



IÖ2 



The Home Book-shelf. 



to drop these victims into the flame— were 
not Christians. Christians have never ac- 
cepted the Grecian dictum that earthly 
beauty is the good and that to be sesthetic 
is to be moral ; but Christianity has always 
encouraged the love of beauty and led the 
way to its use in the worship of God. 

Among Americans, Longfellow had a most 
devout love of the beautiful. And it was 
this love of beauty that drew him near to 
the Church. That eloquent writer Rus- 
kin has little sympathy with men who are 
drawn towards the Church by the beauty 
she enshrines, and he constantly protests 
against the enticements of a Spouse the hem 
of whose garment he kisses. Still, judging 
from his ill-natured diatribe against Pugin, 
in the " Stones of Venice," he had no un- 
derstanding of the sentiment that caused 
Longfellow, when in search of inspiration, 
to turn to the Church. 

Longfellow's love of the melodious, of the 
beautiful, of the symmetrical, led him into 
defects. He could not endure a discord, 
and his motto was " Non clamor, sed amor" 



The Home Book-shelf. 



163 



which, as Coming from him, may be para- 
phrased in one word, "serenity." His su- 
perabundant similes show how he longed to 
carry one thing into another thing of even 
greater beauty, and how this longing some- 
times leads him to faults of taste. 

But this lover of beauty — led by it to the 
very beauty of Ruskin's Circe and his fore- 
fathers' " Scarlet Woman" — came of a race 
that hated beauty. And yet he stretched 
out through the rocky soil of Puritan tradi- 
tions and training until we find him trans- 
lating the sermon of St. Francis of Assisi to 
the birds into English verse, and working 
lovingly at the most Christian of all poems, 
the " Divine Comedy." It was he— this de- 
scendant of the Puritans — who described, as 
no other poet ever described, the innocence 
of the young girl Coming from confession. 
But it was his love of beauty and his love 
of purity that made him do this. In Long- 
fellow's eyes only the pure was beautiful. 
A canker in the rose made the rose hateful 
to him. He was unlike his classmate and 
friend Hawthorne : the stain on the lily did 



164 



The Home Book-shelf. 



not make it more interesting. His love of 
purity was, however, like his hatred of noise, 
a sentiment rather than a conviction. 

The love for the beautiful leads to Rome. 
Ruskin rights against it, Longfellow yields to 
it, and even Whittier — whose lack of cult- 
ure and whose traditions held him doubly 
back — is drawn to the Ipeauty ,of the saints. 

As culture in America broadens and deep- 
ens, respect for the things that Protestantism 
cast out increases. James Russell LoweH's 
paper on Dante, in "Among My Books," is 
an example of this. The comprehension he 
shows of the divine poet is amazing in a son 
of the Puritans. But the human mind and 
the human heart will struggle towards the 

üght. 

Longfellow was too great an artist to try 
to lop off such Catholic traditions as might 
displease his readers. In this he was greater 
than Sir Walter Scott, and a hundred times 
greater than Spenser. Scott's mind, bending 
as a healthy tree bends to the light, stretched 
towards the old Church. She fascinated his 
imagination, she drew his thoughts, and her 



The Home Book-shelf. 165 



beauty won his heart ; but he was afraid of 
the English people. And yet, subservient 
as Scott was, Cardinal Newman avows that 
Sir Walter's novels drew him towards the 
Church ; and there is a letter written by the 
great cardinal in which he laments that the 
youth of the nineteenth Century no longer 
read the novels of the " Wizard of the North." 
Scott cannot get rid of the charm the Church 
throws about him. He was not classical, he 
was romantic. He soon tired of m-ere form, 
as any healthy mind will. The reticent and 
limited beauty of the Greek temple made 
him yawn ; but he was never weary of the 
Gothic church, with its surprises, its splendor, 
its glow, its statues, its gargoyles — all its 
reproductions of the life of the world in its 
relations to God. 

Similarly, Longfellow was not a classicist. 
The coldness of Greek beauty did not appeal 
to him ; he could understand and love the 
pictures of Giotto — the artist of St. Francis — 
better than the " Dying Gladiator." When 
Christianity had given life to the perfect 
form of Greek art, then Longfellow under- 



i66 The Home Book-shelf, 



stood and loved it. And he trusted the 
American people sufficiently not to attempt 
to placate them by concealing or distorting 
the source of his inspiration. No casual 
reader of " Evangeline" can mistake the 
cause of the primitive virtues of the Acadians. 
A lesser artist would have introduced the 
typical Jesuit of the romancers y or hinted that 
a King James's Bible read by Gabriel and 
Evangeline, under the direction of a self- 
sacrificing colporteur, was at the root of all 
the patience, purity, and constancy in the 
poem. But Longfellow knew better than 
this, and the American people took " Evan- 
geline" to their heart without question, ex- 
cept from some carper, like Poe, who envied 
the literary distinction of the poet. We 
must remember, too, that the American 
people of 1847 were not the American people 
of to-day; they were narrower, more pro- 
vincial, less infused with new blood, and 
more prejudiced against the traditions of the 
Church to which Longfellow appealed when 
he wrote his greatest poem. 

It is as impossible to eliminate the cross 



The Home Book-shelf. 167 



from the discovery of America as to love art 
and literature without acknowledging the 
power that preserved both. 



i68 



Of Shaksftere. 



ix. ©( Sbaftspere* 

HE time has come when the Catholics 



A of this country — who possess unmu- 
tilated the seamless garment of Christ — 
should begin to understand the real value 
of the inheritance of art and literature and 
music which is especially theirs. 

The Reformation made a gulf between art 
and religion ; it declared that the beautiful 
had no place in the service of God, and that 
a Student of aesthetics was a student of the 
devil's lore. Of late a reaction has taken 
place. 

Fifty years ago the picture of a Madonna 
by Raphael or Filippo Lippi or Botticelli 
in a populär magazine would have occasioned 
a howl of condemnation from the densely 
ignorant average Protestant of that time. 
But the taste for art has grown immensely 
in the last twenty years, and now — I am 
ashamed to say it — non-Catholics have, in 




Of Shakspere. 



169 



America, learned to know and love the great 
masterpieces of our inheritance more than 
we ourselves. It is we, English-speaking 
Catholics, who have suffered unexpressibly 
from the deadening influence of the Refor- 
mation on aesthetics. As a taste for art and 
literature grows, "orthodox" protest against 
the Church must wane, for the essence of 
M orthodox " protest is misunderstanding of 
the Church which made possible Dante 
and Cervantes. Chaucer and Wolfram von 
Eschenbach, Fra Angelico and Murillo, 
Shakspere and Dryden. And 110 culti- 
vated man, loving them, can hate the 
Church that, while guarding moralitv, like- 
wise protected aesthetics as a stretching out 
towards the immortal. Art and literature 
and music are efforts of the spirit to approach 
God. And, as such, Christianity cherishes 
them. Art and history are one ; art and lit- 
erature are history : and nothing is orrander 
in the panorama of events than the spectacle 
of the fine arts, in Christian times, emptying 
their precious box of ointment on the head 
of Our Lord to atone for the sins of the past. 



170 Of Shakspere. 



The flower of all art is Christian art ; it 
took the perfect form of the Greeks and 
clothed it with luminous flesh and blood. 

Miss Eliza Allen Starr has shown us some 
of the treasures of our inheritance of art. It 
is easy to find them ; good photographs of 
the masters' works — of the Sistine Madonna 
of Raphael, of the Immaculate Conception of 
Murillo, of the Virgin of the Kiss by Hebert, 
and of the beautiful pictures of Bouguereau 
are cheap everywhere. Why, then, with all 
these lovely reflections of Catholic genius 
near us, should we fill our houses with bad, 
cheap prints ? 

Similarly, why should we be content with 
flimsy modern books ? The best of all lit- 
erature is ours — even Shakspere is ours. 

If there is one fault to be found in Car- 
dinal Newman's lecture on " Literature " in 
that great book, " The Idea of a University," 
it is that the most subtle master of English 
style took his view of Continental literature 
from Hallam. When he speaks of English 
literature, he speaks as a master of his sub- 
ject ; on the literature of the Greeks and 



Of Shakspere. 171 



Romans, there is 110 uncertainty in his 
utterances ; but he takes his impressions of 
the literature of France and Spain from a 
non-Catholic critic, whose opinions are tinct- 
ured with prejudice. One cannot help 
regretting that the cardinal did not apply 
the same test to Montaigne that he applied 
to Shakspere. 

Similarly, most of us have been induced, 
by the Puritanism in the air around us, to 
take our opinions of the great English 
classics from text-books compiled by scio- 
lists, who have not gone deep enough to 
understand the course of the currents of 
literature. We accept Shakspere at second 
hand ; if^we took our impressions of his 
works from Professor Dowden or Herr Delius 
or men like George Saintsbury or Horace 
Furness, or, better than all, from himself, it 
would be a different thing. But we do not ; 
if we read him at all, we read him hastily : 
we read " Hamlet" as we would a novel, or 
we are content to nibble at little chunks from 
his plays, which the Compilers graciously 
present to us. 



172 



Of Shakspere* 



The text-book of literature has been an 
enemy to education, because it has been 
generally compiled by persons who were in- 
capable of fair judgment. In this country, 
Father Jenkins's compilation is the best we 
have had. It is a brave attempt to remove 
misapprehensions ; but a text-book should 
be merely a guide to the works themselves. 
There is more intellectual gain in six months' 
close study of the text and circumstances of 
" Hamlet " than in tripping through a dozen 
books of " selections." The Germans found 
this out long ago, and Dr. Gotthold Böttcher 
puts it into Atting words in his introduction 
to Wolfram von Eschenbach's " Parcival." 
The time will doubtless come when even in 
parochial schools the higher " Reader " will 
be a complete book — not a thing of shreds 
and patches, like the little dabs of meat and 
vegetables the keepers of country hotels set 
before us on small plates. This book will, 
of course, be intelligently annotated. 

Some of us have a certain timidity about 
claiming Shakspere as our own and about 
reading his plays to our young people. This 



Of Shakspere. 



i73 



is because we have given in too much to the 
critical spirit, which finds purity in impure 
things, and impurity where no impurity is 
intended. It is time we realize the evil that 
the English speech has done us by uncon- 
sciously impregnating us with alien preju- 
dices. 

Surely no man will accuse Cardinal New- 
man of condoning sensuality or coarseness. 
His idea of propriety is good enough ; it is 
broad enough and narrow enough for us. 
That foreign code which would keep young 
people within artificial barriers and then let 
them loose to wallow in literary filth, that 
hypocritical American code which leaves the 
obscenities of the daily newspaper open and 
closes Shakspere, is not ours. 

Shakspere was the result of Catholic 
thought and training. There is no Puritan- 
ism in him. His plays are Catholic literature 
in the widest sense ; he sees life from the 
Christian point of view. and, depicting it as 
it is, his Standard is a Catholic Standard. 
There is no doubt that there are coarse pas- 
sages in Shakspere's plays — it is easy to 



174 Of Shakspere. 



get rid of them. But they are few. They 
seem immodest because the plainness of lan- 
guage of the Elizabethan time and of the 
preceding times has happily gone out of 
fashion. It would be well to revise our 
definition of immorality, by comparing it 
with the more robust Catholic one, before we 
condemn Shakspere or the Old Testament, 
though the scrupulous Tom Paine, who has 
gone utterly out of fashion, found both 
immoral ! 

Hear Cardinal Newman (" Idea of a Uni- 
versity," page 319) speaking of Shakspere: 
" Whatever passages may be gleaned from 
his dramas disrespectful to ecclesiastical 
authority, still these are but passages ; on 
the other hand, there is in Shakspere neither 
contempt of religion nor scepticism, and he 
upholds the broad laws of moral and divine 
truths with the consistency and severity of an 
yEschylus, Sophocles, and Pindar. There is 
no mistaking in his works on which side lies 
the right ; Satan is not made a hero, nor 
Cain a victim, but pride is pride, and vice is 
vice, and, whatever indulgence he may allow 



Of Shakspere. 



175 



himself in light thoughts or unseemly words, 
yet his admiration is reserved for sanctity 
and truth ; . . . but often as he may offend 
against modesty, he is clear of a worse 
Charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can 
be instanced in all that he has written to 
seduce the imaginatiorf or to excite the pas- 
sions." 

In arranginga course of reading for young 
people, it seems to me that those books 
which define principles should be put first. 
When a reader has a good grasp of defini- 
tions, he is in a mathematical State of mind 
and ready to assimilate truth and reject 
error. Books of literature should not be 
recommended to him until he is sure of his 
principles ; for, unhappily, the tendency of 
American youth is to imagine that what he 
cannot refute is irrefutable. If the young 
reader be thoroughly grounded in the doc- 
trines of his faith and armedwith a few clear 
definitions of the meaning of things, even 
Milton cannot persuade him that Satan is a 
more admirable figure than Our Lord, or 
Byron seduce him into the o.pinion that Cain 



176 



Of Shakspere. 



was wronged, or Goethe that sin is merely a 
more or less pleasing experience. 

It is remarkable that the Puritanism 
which lauds Milton as a household god 
turns its face from Shakspere ; and yet Mil- 
ton's great epic is not only the deification 
of intellectual pride, but it contemns Chris- 
tianity. There are very few men who can 
to-day say that they have read " Paradise 
Lost " line after line with pleasure. There 
are long Stretches of aridity in it ; and those 
who pretend to admire it as a whole are no 
doubt tinctured with literary insincerity. 
But there are glorious passages in the " Para- 
dise Lost," unexcelled in any literature ; and 
therefore the epic should be read in parts, 
and one cannot ... be blamed if he "skip" 
many other parts. The great parts of " Para- 
dise Lost," ought to be read and re-read. The 
comparative weakness of the " Paradise Re- 
gained " shows that Milton had not that 
sympathy with the Redemption which he 
had with the revolt of Satan. And yet, in 
some pious households, where puritanized 
opinion reigns, Shakspere is locked up, 



Of Shakspere. 



177 



while " Paradise Lost " is put beside the 
family Bible ! 

It is not necessary that one should read 
all of Shakspere's writings ; the early 
poems had better be omitted ; but it is nec- 
essary for purposes of culture that one 
should read what one does read with intelli- 
gence. Before beginning " Hamlet " — which 
a thoughtful Catholic can appreciate better 
than any other man — one should clear the 
ground by studying Professor Dowden's 
little " Primer " on Shakspere (Macmillan & 
Co.), and Mr. Furnivall's preface to the 
Leopold edition of Shakspere, and George 
H. Miles's study of " Hamlet." Then, and 
not until then, will one be in a position to 
get real benefit from his reading. To read 
" Hamlet" without some preparation is like 
the inane practice of " going to Europe to 
complete an education never begun at home." 
I repeat that a Catholic can better appreci- 
ate the marvels of Shakspere's greatest play, 
because, even if he know only the Little 
Catechism, he has the key to the play and 
to Shakspere's mind. 



i 7 8 



Of Shakspere, 



The philosophy of " Hamlet " is that sin 
cankers and burns and ruins and corrupts 
even in this world, and that the effects do 
not end in this world. Shakspere, enlight- 
ened by the teaching of centuries since St. 
Austin converted his forefathers, teaches a 
higher philosophy than that of ^Eschylus or 
Euripides or Sophocles — he Substitutes will 
for fate. It is not fate that forces the keen 
Claudius to murder his brother ; it is not 
fate that obliges him to turn away from the 
reproaches of an instructed mind and con- 
science : he chooses ; it is his own will that 
makes the crime ; he does not confuse good 
with evil. The sin of the Queen is not so 
great ; she is ignorant of her husband's 
crime ; in fact, from the usual modern 
point of view, she has committed no sin at 
all. And, as the Danish method of choos- 
ing monarchs permitted the nobles to name 
Claudius king, while her son was mooning 
at the Saxon university, she had done him 
no material wrong. But as there is no men- 
tion of a dispensation from Rome, and as 
Shakspere makes the Danes Catholic, the 



Of Shakspere. 



179 



people of Denmark must have looked on the 
alliance with doubt. The demand made to 
Horatio to exorcise the spirit, as he was a 
scholar; the expression, " 1*11 cross it," 
which Fechter, the actor, rightly interpreted 
as meaning the sign of the cross ; a hundred 
touches, in fact, show that " Hamlet " can and 
ought to be studied with special profit by 
Catholics. 

Suppose that one begins with " Hamlet," 
having cleared the ground, and then takes 
the greatest of the tragi-comedies, " The Mer- 
chant of Venice." Here opens a new field. 
Before beginning this play, it would be well 
to read Mgr. Seton's paper on the Jews in 
Europe, in his excellent " Essays, Chiefly 
Roman." It will give one an excellent idea 
of the attitude of the Church towards Shy- 
lock's countrymen, and do away with the 
impression that Antonio was acting in ac- 
cordance with that attitude when he treated 
Shylock as less than a human being. Portia 
not only offers a valuable contrast to the 
weakness of Ophelia and the criminal weak- 
ness of Gertrude, but she is a type of the 



180 Of Shakspere. 



ideal noblewoman of her time, whose only 
weakness is love for a man of lesser nobility 
than herseif, but who holds his honor as 
greater than life or love. 

Shakspere's " Julius Caesar/' f or comparison 
with " Hamlet, " might come next, and after 
that the most lyrical and poetical of all the 
comedies, "As You Like It," or perhaps 
" The Tempest," with Prospero's simple but 
strong assertion of belief in immortality. 

Having studied these four great works, 
with as much of the literature they suggest 
as practicable, a distinct advance in cultiva- 
tion will have been made. The best College 
in the country can give one no more. But 
they must be studied, not read. He who 
does not know these plays misses part of his 
heritage ; for the plays of Shakspere belong 
more to the Catholic than to the non- 
Catholic. Shakspere was the fine flower of 
culture nurtured under Catholic influences. 



Of Talk, Woi'k, and Amüsement, 181 



x. ©f £alfc t Wlox% anö Bmueement 

HERE are too many etiquette books — 



A too much about the outward look of 
things, and too little about the inward. 
Manners make a great difference in this 
world — w 7 e all discover that sooner or later ; 
but later w r e find out that there are some 
principles which keep society together 
more than manners. If manners are the 
flower, these principles are the roots which 
intricately bind earth and crumbling rocks 
together and make a safe footing. To-day 
the end of preaching seems to be to teach the 
outward form, without the inward light that 
gives the form all its value. By preaching I 
mean the talk and advice that permeate the 
newspapers and books of social instruction. 

Manners are only good, after all, when they 
represent something. What does it matter 
whether Mr. Jupiter makes a charming host 
at his own table or not, if he sit silent a few 




i&2 Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 



minutes after some of his guests are gone, 
and listen to the horrors that one who stays 
behind teils of them ? And if Mrs. Juno, 
whose manners at her "at home" are per- 
fect, sits down and rips and tears at the 
characters of the acquaintances she has just 
fed with coffee and whatever eise answers 
to the fatted calf, shall we believe that she 
is useful to society? 

There is harmless gossip which has its 
place; in life it is like the details in a novel ; 
it is amusing and interesting, because it 
belongs to humanity — and what that is 
human is alien to us? So far as gossip 
concerns the lights and shades of charac- 
ter, the minor miseries and amusing happen- 
ings of life, what honest man or woman has 
not a taste for it? And who values a friend 
less because his peculiarities make us smile ? 

But by and by there comes into the very 
corner of the fireside a guest who disregards 
the crow T n of roses which every man likes to 
hang above his door. The roses mean 
silence — or, at least, that all things that pass 
under them shall be sweetened by the breath 



Of Talk, Work> and Amüsement. 183 



of hospitality; and he adds a little to the 
smile of kindly tolerance, and he paints it as 
a sneer. "You must forgive me for telling 
you," he whispers, when he is safely sheltered 
beneath your friend's garland of roses; "but 
Theseus spoke of you the other night in a 
way that made my blood boil." 

And then the friendship of years is snapped ; 
and then the harmless jest, in which Theseus's 
friend would have delighted even at his own 
expense if he had been present, becomes a 
jagged bullet in an ulcerated wound. Sab 
rosa was a good phrase with the old Latins, 
but who minds it now? It went out of 
fashion when the public began to pay news- 
paper reporters for looking through key- 
holes, and for stabbing the hearts of the inno- 
cent in trying to prove somebody guilty. It 
went out of fashion when private letters be- 
came public property and a man might, 
without fear of disgrace, print, or seil to be 
printed, any scrap of paper belonging to an- 
other that had fallen into his hands. 

A very wise man — a gentle man and a loyal 
man — once said, "A man may be judged by 



184 Of Talk, Woi'k, and Amüsement. 



what he believes." If we could learn the 
truth of this early in life, what harm could 
be done us by the creature who tears the 
thorns out of our hospitable roses, and goes 
about lacerating hearts with them? When 
we hear that Jason has Talled us a fool, we 
should not be so ready to cry out with all 
our breath that he is a scoundrel — because 
we should not be so ready to believe that 
Jason, who was a decent fellow yesterday, 
should suddenly have become the hater of a 
good friend to-day. And when, under stress 
of unrighteous indignation, we have called 
Jason a scoundrel, the listener can hardly 
wait until he has informed Jason of the enor- 
mity; "and thereby hangs a tale. ,, 

But when we get older and wiser, we do 
not ask many people to sit under our roses ; 
and those whom we ask we trust implicitly. 
In time — so happily is our experience— we 
believe no evil of any man with whom we 
have ever cordially shaken hands. Then we 
begin to enjoy life ; and we, too, choose our 
acquaintances by their unwillingness to be- 
lieve evil of others. And as for the man 



Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 185 



who has eaten our salt, we become so opti- 
mistic about him that we would not even 
believe that he could write a stupid book; 
and that is the nirväna of belief in one's 
friends. 

Less manners, we pray — less talk about 
the handling of a fork and the angle of a 
bow, and more respect for the roses. Of 
course, one of us may have said yesterday, 
after dinner, that Jason ought not to talk so 
much about his brand-new coat-of-arms ; or 
that Ariadne, who was a widow, you know, 
might cease to chant the praise of number 
one in the presence of number two. But do 
we not admire the solid qualities of both 
Jason and Ariadne? And yet who shall 
make them believe that when the little ser- 
pent wriggles from our hearthstone to theirs ? 

It is a settled fact that young people must 
be amused. It is a settled fact, or rather an 
accepted fact, that they must be amused 
much more than their predecessors were 
amused. It is useless to ask why. Life in 
the United States has become more compli- 
cated, more artificial, more civilized, if you 



186 Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 



will ; and that Jeffersonian simplicity which 
De Tocqueville and De Bacourt noted has 
almost entirely disappeared. The theatre 
has assumed more license than ever ; it 
amuses — it does not attempt to instruct ; 
and spectacles are tolerated by decent people 
which would have been frowned upon some 
years ago. There is no question that the 
drama is purer than it ever was before ; but 
the spectacle, the idiotic farce, and the light 
opera are more silly and more indecent than 
within the memory of man. The toleration 
of these things all shows that, in the craving 
for amusement, high principle and reasonable 
rules of conduct are forgotten. 

A serious question of social importance is : 
How can the rage for amusement be kept 
within proper bounds? How can it be regu- 
lated ? How can it be prevented from 
making the heart and the head empty and 
even corrupt? In many ways our country 
and our time are serious enough. We need, 
perhaps, a touch of that cheerful lightness 
which makes the life of the Viennese and of 
the Parisian agreeable and bright — which 



Of Talk y Work, and Amüsement. 187 

enableshim to get color and interest into the 
most commonplace things. But our light- 
ness and cheerfulness are likely to be spas- 
modic and extravagant. We are not pleased 
with little things ; it takes a great deal to 
give us delight ; our children are men and 
women too early ; we do not understand 
simplicity — unless it is sold at a high price 
with an English label on it. Luxuries have 
become necessities, and even the children 
demand refinements of enjoyment of which 
their parents did not dream in the days gone 
by. 

And yet the essence of American social 
life ought to be simplicity. We have no 
traditions to support ; a merely rieh man 
without a great family name owes nothing 
to society, except to help those poorer than 
himself ; he has not inherited those great 
establishments which your English or Span- 
ish high lord must keep up or tarnish the 
family name. We have no great families in 
America whose traditions are not those of 
simplicity and honesty, and these are the 
only traditions they are bound to cherish. 



188 Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 



In this way our aristocracy — if we have such 
a thing — ought to be the purest in the world 
and the most simple. There is no reason 
why we should pick up all the baubles that 
the effete folk of the Old World are throw- 
ing away. 

Whether we are to achieve simplicity, and 
consequently cheerfulness, in every-day life 
depends entirely on the women. It is re- 
markable how many Catholic women bred in 
good schools enter society and run a mad 
race in search of frivolities. In St. Francis 
de Sales's " Letters to People in the World " 
there is a record of a lady " who had long 
remained in such subjection to the humors 
of her husband, that in the very height of 
her devotions and ardors she was obliged to 
wear a low dress, and was all loaded with 
vanity outside ; and, except at Easter, could 
never communicate unless secretly and un- 
known to every one — and yet she rose high 
in sanctity." 

But St. Francis de Sales had other words 
for those women of the world who rushed 
into all the complications of luxury, and yet 



Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 189 



who defended their frivolity by the phrase 
" duty to society." The woman who serves 
her children best serves society. And she 
best serves her children by cultivating her 
heart and mind to the utmost ; and by teach- 
ing them that one of the best things in life 
is simplicity, and that it is much easier to be 
a Christian when one is content with a little 
than when one is constantly discontented 
with a great deal. If the old New England 
love for simplicity in the ordinary way of life 
could be revived among Catholics, and sanc- 
tified by the amiable spirit of St. Francis 
of Assisi, the world would be a better 
place. 

Father Faber teils us what even greater 
men have told us before — that each human 
being has his vocation in life. And we nearly 
all accept it as true, but the great difficulty 
is to realize it. Ruskin says that work is not 
a curse; but that a man must like his work, 
feel that he can do it well, and not have too 
much of it to do. The sum of all thismeans 
that he shall be contented in his work, and 
find his chief satisfaction in doing it well. 



190 Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 



It is not what we do, but how we do it, that 
makes success. 

The greatest enemy to a füll understand- 
ing of the word vocation among Americans 
is the belief that it means solely the acquire- 
ment of money. And the reason for this lies 
not in the character of the American — who 
is 110 more mercenary than other people — 
but in the idea that wealth is within the 
grasp of any man who works for it. The 
money Standard, therefore, is the Standard 
of success. But success to the eyes of the 
world is not always success to the man him- 
self. The accumulation of wealth often 
leaves him worn-out, dissatisfied, with a feel- 
ing that he has somehow missed the best of 
life. That man has probably missed his 
vocation and done the wrong thing, in spite 
of the opinion outside of himself that he has 
succeeded. 

The frequent missing of vocations in life 
is due to false ideas about education. The 
parent tries to throw all the responsibility of 
education on the teacher, and the teacher 
has no time for individual moulding. A boy 



Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement, 191 



grows up learning to read and to write, like 
other boys. He may be apt with his head 
or his hands, but how few parents see the 
aptitude in the right light ! It ought to be 
considered and seriously cultivated. The 
tastes of youth may not always be indications 
of the future : they often change with cir- 
cumstances and surroundings. But they are 
just as often unerring indications of the direc- 
tion in which the child's truest success in the 
world will lie. If a boy play at swinging ä 
censer when he is little, or enjoy the sight of 
burning candles on a toy altar, it is not an 
infallible sign that he will be a priest. And 
yet the rosary that young Newman drew on 
his slate, when he was a boy, doubtless 
meant something. 

"The thoughts of youth are long, long 
thoughts," Longfellow sings. He who com. 
prehends them gets near to the heart of 
youth. But who tries to do it ? The boy is 
as great an enigma to his father, as a rule, as 
the old sphinx in the Egyptian desert is to 
passing travellers. And who but his father 
ought to have the key to the boy's mind, and 



192 Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 



find his way into its recesses so gently and 
carefully that the question of his child's 
vocation would be an easy one for him to 
answer ? 

If the religious vocations in this country 
are not equal in number to what they ought 
to be, we may attribute it to these two causes : 
the general desire to make money, and the 
placid indifference of parents. Aboyis sent 
to " school" — school implying a sort of factory 
from which human creatures are turned out 
polished and finished, but not ready for any 
special work in a world which demands 
specialists. And what is specialism but 
the industrious working out of a voca- 
tion ? 

God is very good to a man when that man 
is true to his vocation. To be content in 
one's work is almost happiness. To do one's 
work for the eyes of God is to be as near 
happiness as any creature can come to it in 
this world. Fortunate are they who, like the 
old sculptors of the roof of " the cathedral 
over sea," learn early in life, as Miss Eleanor 
Donnelly puts it, — 



Of Talk, Work, and Amüsement. 193 



" That nothing avails us under the sun, 
In word or in work, save that which is done 
For the honor and glory of God alone." 

Direction and coercion are two different 
things. The parents who mistake one for 
the other make a fatal error. Direction is 
the flower, coercion the weed that grows 
beside it. and kills its strength and sweetness. 

The true gospel of work begins with the 
consideration of vocation, and the prayers 
and the appeals to the sacraments that 
ought to accompany it. This is the genesis 
of that gospel. It is true that if a man can 
be helped to take care of the first twenty 
years of Iiis life, the last twenty years will 
take care of him. Those who find their 
vocation are blessed — 

" And they are the sculptors whose works shall last, 
Whose names shall shine as the stars on high, 
When deep in the dust of a ruined past 
The labors of selrish souls shall iie." 



i 9 4 



The Little Joys of Life, 



XI. Zhc Mittle 30£6 of %ite. 

TT AS enthusiasm gone out of fashion ? 

* Are the young no longer hero-wor- 
shippers ? A recent writer complains of the 
sadness of American youth. u The absence 
of animal spirits among our well-to-do 
young people is a striking contrast to the 
exuberance of that quality in most European 
countries," says this author, in the Atlantic 
Montkly. 

Our young people laugh very much, but 
they are not, as a rule, cheerful ; and they 
are amiable only when they " feel like being 
amiable." This is the most fatal defect in 
American manners among the young. The 
consideration for others shown only when a 
man is entirely at peace with himself is not 
politeness at all: it is the most unrefined 
manifestation of selfishness. 

Before we condemn the proverbial arti- 
ficiality of the French, let us contrast it with 



The Little Joys of Life, 



*95 



the brutality of the average carper at this 
artificiality. "A Frenchman," he will say, 
"will lift his hat to you, but he would not 
give you a sou if you were starving." Let 
us take that assertion for its füll value. We 
are not starving ; we do not want his sou, but 
we do want to have our every-day life made 
as pleasant as possible. And is your average 
brutal and bluff and uncivilized creature the 
more anxious to give his substance to the 
needy because he is ready on all occasions 
to tread on the toes of his neighbor? He 
holds all uttered pleasant things to be lies, 
and the suppression of the brutal a sin 
against truth. One sees this personage too 
often not to understand him well. He is 
half civilized. King Henry VIII. was of 
this kind — charming, bluff old fellow, bub- 
bling over with truth and frankness, slapping 
Sir Thomas More on the back, and füll of 
delicious horseplay, when his dinner agreed 
with him ! It is easy to comprehend that 
the high politeness of the best of the French 
is the result of the finest civilization. No 
wonder Talleyrand looked back and said 



196 



The Little Joys of Life. 



that no man feally enjoyed life who had not 
lived before the Revolution. 

But why should enthusiasm have gone 
out? Why should the young have no 
heroes ? Have the newspaper joke, the 
levity of Ingersoll and the irreverence of 
the stump-speakers, the cynicism of Puck 
and the insolence of Judge, driven out 
enthusiasm? George Washington is men- 
tioned — -what inextinguishable laughter fol- 
lows! — the cherry-tree, the little hatchet ! 
What novel wit that name suggests! One 
must laugh, it is so funny ! And, then, the 
scriptural personages! The paragraphers 
have made Job so very amusing ; and Joseph 
and Daniel ! — how stupid people must be 
who do not roar with laughter at the mere 
mention of these august names ! 

Cannot this odious, brutal laughter, which 
is not manly or womanly, be stopped ? Ridi- 
cule cannot kill it, but an appeal to all the 
best feelings of the human heart might; for 
all the best feelings of the human heart are 
outraged. How funny death has become! 
When shall we grow tired of the joke about 



The Little Joys of Life. 



*97 



the servant who lighted the fire with kero- 
sene, and went above ; or the quite too 
awfully comical jeu cCesprit about the boy 
who ate green apples, and is no more ? These 
jokes are in the same taste that would put 
the hair of a skeleton into curl-papers. Still 
we laugh. 

A nation without reverence has begun to 
die: its feet are cold, though it may still 
grin. A nation whose youth are without 
enthusiasm has no future beyond the piling 
up of dollars. It is not so with our country 
yet; but the fact remains: enthusiasm is dr- 
ing, and hero-worship needs revival. 

One can easily understand why, among 
Catholics, there is not as much hero-wor- 
ship as there ought to be. It is because our 
greatest heroes are not even mentioned in 
current literature, and because they are not 
well presented to our young people. St. 
Francis Xavier was a greater hero than 
Nelson yet Nelson is popularly esteemed 
the more heroic. because Southey wrote his 
life well. But St. Francis's life is written for 
the mystic, for the devotee. It is right, of 



198 



The Little Joys of Life. 



course; but our young people are not all 
mystics or devotees; consequently St. Fran- 
cis seems afar off — a saint to be vaguely 
remembered, but nothing more. 

If the saints whose heroism appeals most 
to the young could be brought nearer to the 
natural young person, they would soon be as 
friends, daily companions — heroes, not dis- 
tant beings whose halos guard them from 
contact. One need only know St. Francis 
of Assisi to be very fond of him. He had a 
sense of humor, too, but no sense of levity. 
And yet the only readable life of this hero 
and friend has been written by a Protestant. 
(I am not recommending it, for there are 
some things which Mrs. Oliphant does not 
understand.) And there is St. Ignatius 
Loyola. And there is St. Charles Borromeo 
— that was a man! And St. Philip Neri, 
who had a sense of humor, and was entirely 
civilized at the same time. And St. Francis 
of Sales! His " Letters to Persons in the 
World " make one wish that he had not 
died so soon. What tact, what knowledg-e 
of the world! How well he persuades 



The Little Joys of Life. 



199 



people without diplomacy, by the force of a 
fine nature open to the grace of God! 

Our young people need only know the 
saints— not out of Alban Butler' s sketches, 
but illumined with reality — to be filled with 
an enthusiasm which Carlyle would have 
had them waste on the wrong kind of 
heroes. 

One of the most interesting pictures of a 
priest in American literature — which of late 
abounds in pictures of good priests — is 
that of Pere Michaux, in Miss Woolson's 
novel " Anne/' He believed that " all should 
live their lives, and that one should not be a 
slave to others ; that the young should be 
young, and that some natural, simple pleas- 
ure should be put into each twenty-four 
hours. They might be poor, but children 
should be made happy ; they might be poor, 
but youth should not be overwhelmed by the 
elders' cares ; they might be poor, but they 
could have family love around the poorest 
hearthstone ; and there was alvvays time for 
a little pleasure, if they would seek it simply 
and moderately." 



200 



The Little Joys of Life. 



But Pere Michaux was French : he had not 
been corrupted by that American Puritanism 
which has, somehow or other, got into the 
blood of even the Irish Celts on this side of 
the Atlantic. Pleasures are not spontaneous 
or simple, and joy is only possible after a 
long period of worry. Simple pleasures — the 
honest little wild-flowers that peep up be- 
tweenthe every-day crevices of each twenty- 
four hours — are neglected because we have 
not been taught to see them. Life may be 
serious without being sad ; but, influenced 
by the Puritan gloom, sadness and serious- 
ness have come to be confounded. 

Man was not made to be sad. Unless 
something is wrong with him, he is not sad 
by temperament. And sadness ought to be 
repressed in early youth. The sad child in 
the stories is pathetic, but the authors gen- 
erally have the good sense to kill him when 
he isyoung. The sad child in real life ought 
not to be tolerated. And if his parents have 
made him sad by putting their bürden of the 
trials of life on him so early, they have done 
him irreparable wrong. Simple pleasures are 



The Little Joys of Life. 



201 



the sunlight of life ; and the little plants 
struggle to the sunshine and find light for 
themselves, darken their dwelling-place as 
you will. The frown in the household, the 
scolding voice, the impatience with childish 
folly — all these things are against the prac- 
tice of the Church and her saints. The 
Catholic sentiment is one of joy — not the 
Sabbath any more, but the Sunday, the day 
of smiles. of rejoicing ; the day on which, as 
old Christian legends have it, the sun is sup- 
posed to dance in honor of the first Easter. 

How much the French and Germans, who 
have not lost the Catholic traditions, make 
of the little joys of life ! If the grandfather's 
name-day come, there is the pot of flowers, 
the little cake with its Ornaments. And how 
many other feasts are made by the poorest 
of them out of what the Americans, rieh by 
comparison, would look on but as a patch 
upon his poverty ! There should be no dark 
days for the young. It is so easy to make 
them happy, if they have not been distorted 
by their surroundings out of the capability 
of enjoying little pleasures. The mother who 



202 



The Little Joys of Life. 



teaches her daughters that poverty is not 
death to all joy, and that the enjoyment of 
simple things makes life easier and keeps 
people younger — such a mother is kinder to 
her girls, gives them a better gift than the 
diamond necklace which the spoiled girl 
craves, and then finds good only so far as it 
excites envy in others. 

Children should not be made to bear a 
weight of sadness. That girl will not long 
for an electric doli if she has been taught to 
get the poetry of life out of a rag-baby. And 
the boy will not pine for an improved bicycle, 
and sulk without it, if he has learned to swim. 
The greatest pleasures are the easiest had — 

" Each ounce of dross costs an ounce of gold ; 

For a cap and bells our lives we pay ; 
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking: 

Tis Heaven alone that is given away, — 
Tis only God may be had for the asking." 

Those who have suffered and borne suffer- 
ingbest are the most anxious that the young 
should enjoy the simple joys of life. Like 
this Pere Michaux, they look for a little 



The Little Joys of Life. 203 



pleasure in each twenty-four hours. Is it a 
wild rose laid by a plate at the simple dinner, 
a new story, a romp, ungrudging permission 
for some small relaxation of the ordinary 
rules, or a brave attempt to keep sorrow 
away from the young? No matter ; it is a 
little thing done for the Holy Child and for 
childhood, that ought to be holy and joy- 
ous. 

There is a commercial axiom that declares 
that we get out of anything just as much 
as we put into it. This may be true in 
trade or not ; it is certainly true of other 
things in life. 

When the frost begins to make the blood 
tingle, and the glow of neighborly fires has 
more than usual comfort for the passer-by, 
as he sees them through Windows and thinks 
of his own, the fragrance of home seems to 
rise more strongly than ever, and then there 
is a longing that the home-circle may revolve 
around a common centre. Sometimes this 
longing takes the form of resolutions to 
make life more cheerful ; and sometimes 
even the father wonders if he, in some way, 



204 



The Litile Joys of Life. 



cannot make home more attractive. As a 
rule, however, he leaves it to the mother ; 
and if the young people yawn and want to 
go out, it must be her fault. The truth is, 
he expects to reap without having sown. 

Home can be made cheerful only by an 
effort. Why, even friendship and love will 
perish if they are not cultivated ; and so if 
the little virtues of life — the little flowers — 
are not carefully tended they must die. 
Young people cannot be imprisoned or kept 
at home by force. We cannot get over the 
change that has come about — a change that 
has eliminated the old iron hand and rod 
from family life. We must take things as 
they are. And the only way to direct the 
young, to influence, to help them, is to in- 
terest them. 

Books are resources and consolation ; 
study is a resource and consolation. Both 
are strong factors in the best home-life ; and 
the man who can look back with gratitude 
to the time when, around the home-lamp, he 
made one of the circle about his father's 
table, has much to be thankful for; and we 



The Little Joys of Life. 



205 



venture to assert that the Coming man whose 
father will give him such a remembrance to 
be thankful for can never be an outcast, or 
grow cold, or bitter, or cynical. 

But the taste for books does not come 
always by nature : it must be cultivated. And 
everything between Covers is not a book ; 
and a taste for books cannot be cultivated in 
a bookless house. It may be said that there 
is 110 Catholic literature, or that it is very 
expensive to buy books, or that it is difficult 
to get a small number of the best books, or 
to be sure that one has the best in a small 
compass. 

None of these things is true — none of 
them. There is a vast Catholic literature, and 
a vast literature, not professedly Catholic, 
which is good and pure, whieh will stimulate 
a desire for study, and help to cultivate 
every quality of the mind and heart. Does 
anybody realize how many good books twelve 
or fifteen dollars will buy nowadays ? And, 
after all, there are not fifty really great 
books in all languages. If one have fifty 
books, one has the best literature in all 



206 



The Little Joys of Life. 



languages. A book-shelf thus furnished is a 
treasure which neither adversity nor fatigue 
nor sickness itself can take away. Each 
child may even have his own book-shelf, with 
his favorites on it, and such volumes as treat 
of his favorite hobby — for every child old 
enough should have a hobby, even if it be 
only the collecting of pebbles, and every 
chance should be given to enjoy his hobby 
and to develop it into a serious study. A 
little fellow who used to ränge his pebbles 
on the table in the lamplight, and get such 
hints as he could about them out of an old 
text-book, is a great geologist. And a little 
girl who used to hang over her very own 
copy of Adelaide Procter's poems is spoken 
of as one of the cleverest newspaper men 
(though she is a woman) in the city of New 
York. The taste of the early days, encour- 
aged in a humble way, became the talent 
which was to make their future. 

There should be no bookless house in all 
this land — least of all among Catholics, 
whose ancestors in Christ preserved all that 
is great in literature. Let the trashy novels, 



The Little Joys of Life. 



207 



paper-backed, soiled, borrowed or picked 
up, be cast out. Let the choosing of books 
not be left to mere chance. A little brains 
put into it will be returned with more than 
its first value. What goes into the precious 
minds of the young ought not to be care- 
lessly chosen. And it is true that, in the 
beginning, it is the easiest possible thing to 
interest young people in good and great 
books. But if one lets them wallow in 
whatever printed stuff happens to come in 
their way, one finds it hard to conduct them 
back again. Let the books be carefully chosen 
— a few at a time — be laid within the circle 
of the evening lamp — and God bless you all ! 



H 113 82 4 



PRINTED BY BENZIGER BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 



